Congratulations to ISCLH member Tristan Brown's Monograph Laws of the Land for winning The John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History since 1800 of American Historical Association (2024)!
Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China (Princeton University Press, 2023)
Overview of the Monograph
Today the term fengshui, which literally means “wind and water,” is recognized around the world. Yet few know exactly what it means, let alone its fascinating history. In Laws of the Land, Tristan Brown tells the story of the important roles—especially legal ones—played by fengshui in Chinese society during China’s last imperial dynasty, the Manchu Qing (1644–1912).
Employing archives from Mainland China and Taiwan that have only recently become available, this is the first book to document fengshui’s invocations in Chinese law during the Qing dynasty. Facing a growing population, dwindling natural resources, and an overburdened rural government, judicial administrators across China grappled with disputes and petitions about fengshui in their efforts to sustain forestry, farming, mining, and city planning. Laws of the Land offers a radically new interpretation of these legal arrangements: they worked. An intelligent, considered, and sustained engagement with fengshui on the ground helped the imperial state keep the peace and maintain its legitimacy, especially during the increasingly turbulent decades of the nineteenth century. As the century came to an end, contentious debates over industrialization swept across the bureaucracy, with fengshui invoked by officials and scholars opposed to the establishment of railways, telegraphs, and foreign-owned mines.
Demonstrating that the only way to understand those debates and their profound stakes is to grasp fengshui’s longstanding roles in Chinese public life, Laws of the Land rethinks key issues in the history of Chinese law, politics, science, religion, and economics.
About the Prize Winner
Tristan Brown 张仲思 is a historian of late imperial China and currently S.C. Fang Chinese Language and Culture Career Development Professor at MIT. He graduated from Harvard University in 2010 and received his MA (2011) and PhD (2017) from Columbia University. Tristan is interested in the history of Chinese law, science, and environment, particularly in the ways these fields interacted in the Qing period. His publications include Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China（Princeton University Press, 2023). The book employs central and local archives to reconstruct the ways people in the Qing understood the land and their environments.
张仲思（Tristan G Brown）教授目前任职于美国麻省理工学院（MIT）。他于2010年获得哈佛大学学士学位，于2011年和2017年分别获得哥伦比亚大学硕士及博士学位。他目前主要专注于中国古代法律、科学和环境之间动态关系的研究。他的著作包括普林斯顿大学2023年出版的英文专著《山川之典：风水与清代地方行政》，该著作通过对清代中央与地方的档案的探究，来剖析古代中国人对土地、环境与社会的理解与世界观。
Comments