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DAY 1 

 Friday, June 11  1500 CET (2100 China /0900 EDT/0600 PDT)

15:00-15:15 Annie Chan (LMU Munich, CRCAO Paris)

      Opening remarks   Outlook and Insight: Cosmopolitan Artifacts

Constructed Worlds
通都大邑

      Discussant: Puay Peng Ho (National University of Singapore, UNESCO)

15:15-15:35 Annette Kieser (University of Münster)

Jiankang, the capital of the Six Dynasties of southern China (220-581) is described in the written sources as a natural commercial metropolis: It was the place where a massive river network met the sea, and where the port region harbored barges conducting trade with the south seas. Merchants and immigrant groups from other parts of the empire as well as from outside the empire inhabited the southern parts of the capital. Thus, from historical perspective, Jiankang meets all the requirements to be considered a truly cosmopolitan city. The cosmopolitan character, however, is said to have existed in the capital mainly and is contrasted to the vernacular culture of the surrounding hinterland.
My paper will explore the nature of cosmopolitan manifestations in the Six Dynasties archaeological material (mainly from tombs) addressing aspects such as trade, courtly exchange, pilgrimage, and patronage. In contrast to a centralized, capital-based concept of cosmopolitanism as stated in the texts, the paper will further explore its manifestations in regional centers. Defining and critically discussing markers as possible indicators for cosmopolitanism I will test these against tomb findings from both capital and regional centers. Several case studies will discuss questions arising from archaeological evidence in the context of cosmopolitanizing processes.

15:35- 16:00 Zheng Wei 韦正 (Peking University)

From the sites and tombs of the Pingcheng period in the Northern Wei Dynasty, it is not difficult to see the influence of foreign culture on the social life of Pingcheng in the Northern Wei Dynasty. Unlike high-end foreign products that are difficult to replicate, and had mainly an influence on elite and distinct individuals, ordinary objects can better reflect the influence of foreign civilizations during this period. Through architectural forms (such as pointed arched tomb doors, etc.) and household items (such as sarcophagus beds, lampstands, inkstones, pottery, painted patterns on the surface of lacquer coffins, etc.), my paper shows that there is considerable foreign influence on various aspects of social life in Pingcheng from household items to architectural decorations, extending to music, acrobatics, and dance. In a certain sense, Sino-foreign communications began in the Pingcheng period of the Northern Wei Dynasty. The main reason is probably related to the fact that the origin of the Northern Wei regime is different from that of the Han and Jin regimes. When identifying the influence of foreign cultures, we should nevertheless remain objective and not overestimate their effects on the Pingcheng epoch of the Northern Wei Dynasty.

16:00-16:15

      Moderated Discussion

16:15-16:30

      Coffee Break

16:30- 16:50 Nancy Steinhardt (University of Pennsylvania)

During the period 1115-1234 a people a people known as Jurchen ruled the Jin dynasty in Northeast Asia, territory that included parts of today’s Northeastern China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Russia. The seventy-five years leading to the formation of this empire saw a transformation of forest dwellers named “Wild Jurchen” in Chinese texts to an empire ruled from capital cities with palaces, Buddhist monasteries, and royal tombs. This paper explores the role of cosmopolitanism in the Jin dynasty.

In some ways, Jin was always an empire on the fringes of sedentary society. In 1119, a written language was developed but neither original nor translated books in Jurchen survive. Only stele inscriptions and poetry are known. The Jurchen ruled from six cities, beneath or near today’s Acheng (in Heilongjiang), Datong, Liaoyang, Ningcheng (in Inner Mongolia), Beijing, and Kaifeng, and used many other cities across their empire, yet all of them borrowed heavily from cities of peoples they, or those they conquered, had conquered: Parhae (698-926), Liao (907-1125) and Northern Song (960-1126). Approximately seventy timber-frame Jin buildings survive, yet ninety percent are small structures of only three bays across the front. The Jurchen built at least one ritual structure. This project seeks to understand the role of city-building and architecture in cosmopolitanism.

Cosmopolitanism among the Jurchen is investigated through physical remains, excavation sites, and excavated objects. The paper first looks at the material regionally and temporally, beginning with the construction of Acheng in 1124, moving south as far as Beijing, east to eastern Russian, and west to Mongolia. Last it turns to the northern Chinese provinces Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan, Hebei, and Shandong. It concludes by assessing if one can understand Jin cosmopolitanism across the empire or if cosmopolitanism more accurately describes the parts of the empire most heavily influenced by China.

16:50- 17:10 Susanne Reichert (University of Bonn)

As a normative idea, cosmopolitanism is first and foremost an attitude and a mindset. In what way can such a concept of a world view be proven in material sources and filled with content? This question arises for me as an archaeologist who is mainly concerned with the material legacies of past times. Ideological concepts are notoriously hard to erudite through archaeological sources, but this observation should not keep us from accepting the challenge. How can I read cosmopolitanism from material objects? To find a suitable case study, first of, we need to find a case in which we can assume a certain intentional design and communication. Normally, burials are taken as source material par excellence to approach such questions. In this paper, I will explore the city Karakorum in Central Mongolia, the first capital of the Mongol empire from the 13th and 14th century, with regard to cosmopolitan expressions in its material culture: The city has been planned and erected from scratch without prior settlements in its spot. The basis to presume a certain, possibly even ideological plan in its design can be taken therefore as given. Different aspects on varying scales will be explored to trace instances of cosmopolitan expressions: from the availability and use of individual materials to the layout of the city itself. Beyond the identification of material expressions of cosmopolitanism, however, the paper will throw light on the question, whether there was a lasting effect of the constated patterns.

17:10- 17:25

      Moderated Discussion

17:25-18:00

   Q&A

DAY 2

 Saturday, June 12  1500 CET (2100 China /0900 EDT/0600 PDT)

Borders and Liminalities
四海為家

Discussants: Maddalena Barenghi (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice), Chiara Bocci (LMU Munich)

15:00-15:20 Soojung Han (Princeton University)

The courts of the Northern Dynasties (386-589) are thematically known for their acceptance of Chinese norms and their gradual Sinicization. In particular, Emperor Xiaowen’s (r.471-499) “Sinicization policies” are hailed as the centerpiece of state adherence to “Chinese” customs and institutions. In this paper, through the exploration of marriage practices, I question this perception of a one-sided acculturation process during this period. This period saw unique marriage systems such as the absence of crown princesses, the dichotomy of non-Han empresses and Han consorts, and the debut of coterminous empresses. I argue that these systems were purposefully and effectively used by Northern Dynasties’ emperors to effectively rule over both non-Han and Han peoples. In addition to securing a firmer grasp over both non-Han and Han aristocratic families, these systems contributed to the preservation of imperial families’ nomadic identities, without segregating their Han Chinese counterparts. Rather than a Sinicization, a close look at these phenomena reveals that these systems were in fact the result of rational and deliberate decision-making. In north China which teemed with an amalgamation of Han and non-Han peoples, these unique marriage systems were an attempt at coexistence—to find “middle ground”—at the convergence between two worlds. The marriage practices of the Northern Dynasties period paved the path for a cosmopolitan Tang where people from all walks of life intermingled.

15:20- 15:40 Jonathan Skaff  (Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania)

The Tang Dynasty popularly is considered to be China’s uniquely glorious cosmopolitan age whose elites were eager to accept exotic foreign cultural elements, especially related to religion, art, music, dance, food, and material culture. In my book, Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongols Neighbors, I argue that there has been an overemphasis on the uniqueness of Sui-Tang cosmopolitanism. I note that the geography of the borderlands between North China and Inner Asia was a key factor encouraging cosmopolitan trends over the longue durée. In these borderlands, farmland intertwined and interconnected with the steppe. Agriculture occurred at oases surrounded by desert and steppe, and agropastoralism existed in cultivated valleys with grasslands in surrounding foothills and mountains. Borderland farming towns and cities with food and water were natural stopping places on not only the well-known “Silk Roads” of east-west caravan routes, but also the lesser-known “Steppe Roads” running through the Eurasian steppe from Siberian forests in the north to agricultural regions such as China in the south. On the “Steppe Roads,” coined by the historian David Christian, trade was driven by “natural” economic exchanges of agricultural and pastoral products.

Borderland communities located on crossroads of the Silk and Steppe routes, like the city of Guyuan in modern Ningxia, were particularly active sites of cultural contestation, experimentation, innovation and mutual influence that are characteristic of cosmopolitanism. Guyuan is situated in a valley suited to farming and pastoralism, and also a junction of major routes leading from Chang’an in the southeast, Mongolia in the north, and the Hexi corridor in the northwest. Guyuan’s position as a crossroads, gave the city a strategic importance that required ruling dynasties to station military personnel, which seems to be another factor encouraging ethnic diversity and cosmopolitanism.

Besides being a natural meeting place of cultures, early medieval Guyuan is suited to the study of cosmopolitanism because of the work of modern archaeologists who have uncovered a relatively rich record of epitaphs and artifacts from tombs dating to the Northern Zhou (557-581), Sui (581-617) and Tang (618-907) dynasties. The evidence comprises the surviving contents of over fifty tombs of the local elite with variations in rituals that hint at the multiethnic composition of the local populace. The items found in the tombs include not only exotic imports and luxury goods typical of contemporary northwestern China, but also some strange and unique artifacts that appear to be creative products of intercultural interactions at Guyuan.

15:40-15:55

      Moderated Discussion

15:55-16:10

      Coffee Break

16:10- 16:30 Mark Gamsa (Tel Aviv University)

In the first part of my talk, I would like to discuss instances in which the above terms have been applied to China and the Chinese. In the second part, I will outline the careers of six individuals – two Chinese, two Indians and two Japanese – who moved between Asia and the West in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century while addressing varied audiences mostly as the messengers of philosophical and artistic Asian spirituality.
We might then reflect on how best to name such people: were these cosmopolitans? Or rather, biculturals? Maybe cultural hybrids? And how does the Chinese involvement in cross-cultural conversations between East and West in that period compare with the Indian and the Japanese?

16:30- 16:50 Rui Hua (Harvard University, Yale University)

This paper explores the vernacular geography of cosmopolitan legal imaginations in the Manchurian countryside in the first half of the twentieth century.
The life of this legal cosmopolitanism started in a series of unlikely stories: a Chinese peasant using the Russian Tsar for war damages. A Manchu widow thwarting Japanese land grabbing by planting trees (on said land). A Mongol lama evading Qing rule through transnational litigation. An American consul mediating disputes between Chinese and Korean farmers. These jurispractices may seem utterly preposterous, yet they appealed to the normative imaginations of the open borderland.
“Cosmopolitan and patriotism,” writes Kawame Appiah, “…are both sentiments more than ideologies.” The legal battles I describe unfolded in a world of sentimental cosmopolitanisms. The beliefs, imageries, and affects of international justice did not travel into this world through state-led legal transplantation in Shanghai and Canton. Rather, they took shape as legal information circulated, haphazardly, among migrants and traders in liminal places like Vladivostok, Andong, and Kantōshū. Semi-literate peasants knew little about Henry Wheaton and the Hague. Yet they embraced the cosmopolitan outlook of transnational justice as they traveled, literally and legally, across the many borders of the borderland. Their cosmopolitan imaginations were not too different from that of Carlo Ginzburg’s Italian peasant in The Cheese and the Worms: international law was their cheese, lawyers and diplomats the worms. This paper aims to describe the porous cultural texture of cheese’s law.

16:50- 17:10 Elke Papelitzky (KU Leuven)

Ming and Qing mapmakers imagined the world in many different forms, combining influences from the Islamic world and Western Europe with Chinese understandings of the world to various degrees. The resulting world maps showed their comprehensive aim through titles including terms such as tianxia 天下, sihai 四海, and wanguo 萬國, each alluding to ideas of cosmopolitanism.
While wanguo maps always map the whole globe, maps titled tianxia and sihai do not, lacking particularly a depiction of the Americas. Asia, Europe, and to a lesser degree Africa, were part of tianxia and sihai, but the Pacific world and the Americas were not.
These maps sketch different power balances, ranging from China and India in equal parts taking up most of the space, to maps focusing on the Ming and Qing empires as the central point surrounded by less significant regions, to maps that represent all continents in a more balanced way. These representations did not stay static but shifted over time – even when considering maps with the same title. Some mapmakers combined different kinds of world maps on one single sheet of paper showing that they considered different modes of mapping the world equally correct.
As Gerard Delanty has pointed out, there is a plurality of ideas of cosmopolitanism. This paper aims to analyze the different views of cosmopolitanism expressed on Chinese world maps and how these views recalibrated perceived balances of power over time.

17:10- 17:25

      Moderated Discussion

17:25-18:00

   Q&A

DAY 3

 Friday, June 18  1500 CET (2100 China /0900 EDT/0600 PDT)

Inside Out
禮尚往來

      Discussant: Minghui Hu (University of California Santa Cruz)

15:00-15:20 Lianming Wang (Heidelberg University)

Departing from a monumental painting with a wide variety of plants, now kept in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, this talk attempts to scrutinize the Sino-European botanical exchanges in the larger context of the physiocratic movement. Having identified the plants depicted in this painting, I will first link them to the Jesuit botanical practices in Beijing, arguing that Chinese garden plants were particularly desired by the great European patrons rather than medical herbs and other exotic flora. Behind this was the belief in physiocracy that the superiority of Chinese agriculture would boost the economy and benefit the European learned societies. Bearing this in mind, the second part of this talk contextualizes the commission of this painting by placing it among the “commercial images” ordered by Henri-Léonard Jean-Baptiste Bertin (1720–1792), a key figure in the French physiocratic movement and the eighteenth-century Sino-European cultural exchanges.

15:20- 15:40 Sebastian Eicher (LMU Munich)

The mid-nineteenth century was a time of extensive knowledge exchange between West and East. After the arrival of the Protestant missionaries many books on geography, mathematics, astronomy but also on history were translated. In this way, western readers learned about Confucius and Zhu Xi and Chinese readers were introduced to Homer and Cicero. The Chinese translations were produced by a group of men of letters who worked for Western missionaries and who are sometimes referred to as “treaty port intellectuals” or wenren 文人. They are usually characterized by their openness towards the knowledge of the world and their critical attitude towards their traditional upbringing. This simplified narrative ignores the intentions of individual actors and the processes of acculturation behind the knowledge exchange itself. In order to shed more light on the early exchange of historical knowledge, my paper will analyze the case of Jiang Dunfu 蔣敦復 (1808-1867), an employee of the London Missionary Society in Shanghai, who wrote the Haiwai liang yiren zhuan 海外兩異人傳 (“Accounts of two outstanding man from overseas”), in which he narrated and interpreted the lives of Julius Caesar (100-44) and George Washington (1732-1799) for a Chinese audience.

15:40-15:55

      Moderated Discussion

15:55-16:10

      Coffee Break

16:10- 16:30 Haina Jin 金海娜 (Communication University of China)

The paper examines the translation of silent films, both foreign and Chinese and the Cosmopolitan Shanghai from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1920s.When film was brought into China at the end of the nineteenth century, live interpretation was often provided to help the Chinese audience to understand “Western shadow plays”. With the increasing number of foreign films showed in Shanghai, exhibitors experimented with using subtitles to help the Chinese audience to understand foreign films. In addition, pamphlets and movie fictions served as complementary methods for Chinese audience to know about foreign films. Meanwhile, great ambitions motivated Chinese film companies to translate their productions: the potential profit from international audiences, the desire to replace the negative image of Chinese people portrayed in Hollywood films with a positive image of China, and the opportunity to introduce Chinese culture to the world. Driven by these ambitions, Chinese film companies placed great emphasis on translation quality and hired both Chinese and foreign translators to perfect their translations. The vibrant translation activities of early cinema constructed an international cultural space, constituted a cosmopolitan cultural scene in Shanghai, and was a marker of cinematic modernity in China.

16:30- 16:50 Anna Stecher (LMU Munich)

Inspired by notions of “critical” and “dialogical” cosmopolitanism, this paper explores the reading of contemporary Chinese theatre and drama through the lens of cosmopolitanism theories.
As a part of literature and the arts, theatre naturally is open to different readings and interpretations. However, recent “Western” approaches towards Chinese drama have focused nearly exclusively on interpretations, i.e. explaining and interpreting Chinese theatre within “Chinese” contexts of the past and present. Interestingly, this approach has not only inspired the interpretation of dramatic texts but also shaped the presentation and making of stage works.
By applying a “cosmopolitan lens”, my paper sets out to uncover another dimension of contemporary Chinese theatre. Specifically, I will explore how contemporary Chinese theatre works, dramatic texts as well as stage performances, can be read as comments and reflections on shared life experiences in the contemporary world. Using a number of examples, my paper aims to show that a “cosmopolitan reading” could make contemporary Chinese theatre especially valuable and approachable for theatre people and audiences outside China.

16:50- 17:05

      Moderated Discussion

17:05-17:40

   Q&A

DAY 4

 Saturday, June 19  1500 CET (2100 China /0900 EDT/0600 PDT)

Cosmos + Polis =
天下?

      Discussant: Hans van Ess (LMU Munich)

15:00-15:20 Yuri Pines (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Qin imperial unification of 221 BCE is often conceived as “unification of China.” Whereas from the long-term perspective of Chinese history this view is surely valid, it obscures some of the major trends of the Warring States period (453-221 BCE). Back then, the Zhou (“Chinese”) world was moving in the direction of internal consolidation of large territorial states amid their increasing political and cultural separation from the neighbors. This process unmistakably recalls similar developments in early modern Europe, where, as is well known, these resulted in the formation of nation-states. In China, however, the development trajectory was markedly different. The potential transformation of the competing Warring States into full-fledged separate entities never materialized. The unified empire was eventually accepted as the sole legitimate solution to political turmoil, while individual states were denied the right of existence. Why the Chinese development trajectory diverged so markedly from what happened in modern Europe?
To answer this question, I shall focus on the extraordinary role played by politically active intellectuals of the Warring States period. By decisively prioritizing the common good of “All-under-Heaven” rather than of an individual polity, by denigrating local identities, and by rejecting legitimacy of regional states, these intellectuals paved the way to political unification of the Zhou world long before it occurred. The paper will address the idealistic and egoistic reasons for this choice and will explore whether or not the pronounced universalism of the Warring States-period intellectuals can be considered China’s earliest example of cosmopolitanism.

15:20- 15:40 Shao-yun Yang  (Denison University)

The Tang dynasty is the only period of Chinese history to which the word “cosmopolitan” is now routinely applied in Western-language scholarship. In previous work, I have criticized this usage for its tendency toward an uncritical, under-theorized, and over-romanticized understanding of the Tang empire. In the past decade or so, celebration of the Tang as a “cosmopolitan” golden age has also been politicized in China as an element of nationalist propaganda surrounding the “Chinese Dream” ideology, the Belt and Road Initiative, and the Chinese exceptionalist discourse of a revived tianxia world order. In this paper, I will suggest that “cosmopolitanism” can only be refined into an analytically rigorous framework for studying the Tang if we free it from the emperor-centered or Chang’an-centered view rooted in the Sinocentric vision of tianxia and imposed by much of the Chinese source material. Even explaining Tang “cosmopolitanism” primarily in terms of the legacy of the Xianbei (*Särbi) dynasties of north China, as some historians have been inclined to do, still gives us only a partial picture. Instead, we should seek to place the Tang empire’s foreign connections firmly in the wider context of Eurasian history in the latter half of the first millennium CE, including: the heyday of the “Buddhist cosmopolis”; the Sogdian diaspora; the rise and fall of the Turkic and Tibetan empires; the rise, expansion, and division of the Islamic caliphate; the maturation of Indian Ocean trade networks; and the emergence of Sinographic states in northeast Asia and Yunnan. In each of these cases, transregional perspectives founded on interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration can, and have already begun to, add depth and balance to our understanding of the Tang.

15:40-15:55

      Moderated Discussion

15:55-16:10

      Coffee Break

      Keynote Lecture

16:10- 16:50 Pamela Kyle Crossley (Dartmouth College)

16:50-17:20

    Q&A

17:20-18:00

    Conference After-party (Speakers and invited participants)