Gastbeitrag von Forrest Cale McSweeney
Herr Forrest Cale McSweeney, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, war im Rahmen des Stipendienprogramms der Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz im Jahr 2024 als Stipendiat an der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. Forschungsprojekt: „Military Drugs From Soldiers to Physicians“
Dieser Beitrag erschien zuerst auf dem Blog der Staatsbibliothek.
In the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912), military medicine, and particularly military drugs, were an aspect of the income of soldiers. In a complex system of local procurement, the Qing government steered both simple ingredients and physicians themselves to the privileged Manchu warrior elite in the Eight Banners often stationed in the far West, and likewise to regular soldiers in the Green Standard Armies. After the 1780s this procurement process was governed by the War Expenditures Regulations junxuzeli 軍需則例 (the Qing created specialized regulations called zeli 則例 for a variety of administrative domains). However, apart from this, the Qing emperors dispatched chengyao 成藥, or pre-prepared formulas, directly to soldiers throughout the empire through the honorary conferral system which had been a regular feature of government in imperial governments since the Tang Period (618–907).
Such pre-prepared formulas were the products of China’s new and enormous bulk of pharmaceutical industry. By the 18th century these firms had begun to aggressively publish and market their drugs directly to consumers, particularly through the circulation of their catalogues (yaomu 藥目). The most successful pharmacy and the one closest to the Qing government was the Tongrentang 同仁堂. Of the 95 formulas confirmed to have been distributed to Qing soldiers from the 18th through the 19th century, 47 appeared on the Tongrentang’s catalogue. This amounted to a virtual subsidy for the metropolitan pharmaceutical industry in the Qing.
This cuts against our typical understanding of medicine in the Qing, which according to most scholars became far less attached to the state both materially and discursively throughout late imperial China from the mid-Ming (1368–1644). But was the state merely an indirect player in this new scene? Is it possible that the Qing state’s drug distribution efforts actually enhanced the profile of some drugs over others, even over that of the efforts of the pharmaceutical industry? Moreover, what can the Berlin Library’s Unschuld collection, the “Chinese Medical Manuscripts”, add to this discussion? These roughly thousand manuscripts contain a wide variety of individually copied medical texts primarily intended for private or use within a closed system of associates and circulated only incidentally. They range from copies of esteemed medical classics to large numbers of recipe collections reflecting the individual inclinations of physicians often operating beneath the level of mainstream medical literature.
It has long been a suspicion by scholars that in the late imperial period, the classical medical tradition operated more often than not as a legitimizing veneer over a much more obscure level of practical discourse which, in practice, viewed classical medical systems established in the Han Period (202 BCE–220 CE) expediently. With the added variable of known military drugs, we can further develop and clarify this hypothesis. Was Chinese practical medical discourse organized in any systematic way? Were there obvious patterns of consumption and practice which point to the influence of institutions, including the state? We can start to answer these questions by first trying to create a clear indicator of the Qing state’s capacity to modify medical discourse, starting at the published literate level. With the use of digital humanities tools and including many open-source databases, it is possible to see in clear terms the profile specific formulas had in the published medical records. The big pharmacies like the Tongrentang did not limit themselves to formulas they themselves allegedly invented, but rather they also co-opted previously existing formulas from a wide variety of origins, sometimes medieval or even ancient. Comparing the incidence of military formulas vs. Tongrentang (TRT) formulas across time, reaching back to the Song‑Jin‑Yuan Period (SJY, 960–1368), all relative to a control group as a baseline, can begin to illustrate the relative power of the state to enhance the profile of a specific formula.
Nearly all formulas distributed by the Qing or sold by the TRT which ultimately came from the medieval period begin at a consistently low textual incidence of 1‑2 texts per formula during the SJY and remain flat until the mid-Ming, when printing in all literary fields exploded. TRT formulas show a tendency to increase over time from the Ming (3.2 texts per formula) to the end of the Qing (10.1) – a factor of 3.2, noticeably higher than control at 2.7. The Qing government, when distributing medieval-era formulas, tended to select from high profile formulas, which increase from 7.45 in the early Ming to 35.25 by the late Qing texts – a factor of 4.3. But the Qing government often distributed TRT formulas to Qing soldiers. Such hybrid formulas skyrocketed in Qing texts, increasing by a factor of 7.85. It seems from this that Qing military distribution could have acted as a multiplier on TRT formulas, but this can only be seen most clearly when comparing these against military formulas totally unaffiliated with the TRT, where the factor actually increases – to 8.3. The Qing government was just as strong a multiplier as the most famous pharmacy in China, if not stronger.
The Unschuld manuscripts provide a glimpse into the efforts by physicians by the late Qing and early republican periods to determine the composition of such popular formulas, as the great pharmacies tended only to publish their applications, not their compositions. Formulas which came from the Qing’s Imperial Medical Academy Taiyiyuan 太醫院 were only recorded semi-officially in the private intra-government diaries and formularies of the Taiyiyuan and Imperial Pharmacy Yuyaofang 御藥房 physicians, which remained unpublished until modern times.
One group of military formulas stands out in terms of their relevance to the collection. They are those formulas which have an extremely limited or even negligible presence in the larger historical-literary record, yet were nonetheless distributed to Qing soldiers. It is in the Unschuld collection where some of the only historical records exist of what precisely these formulas (in total 14) consisted of and what they were used for by physicians. If Qing military distribution was a significant multiplier to a formula’s profile, then why did these formulas remain relatively obscure and appear only in practical literature? Analyzing the Unschuld manuscripts for patterns against the assumption that military distribution affected the formulas’ profiles offers clues. Despite all having virtually no presence in mainstream texts, medical or otherwise, some formulas can still be incredibly common across the practical domain. The drug Huanglianshangqingwan 黃連上清丸 “Pills with Rhizoma Coptidis to Clear the Upper Body” is an example of this, being invisible in medical and historical literature yet appearing in 52 separate manuscripts. At the other extreme is “Depression-Overcoming Harmony-Preserving Pill” Yuejubaohewan 越菊保和丸, which appears in only two.
Formulas were often obscure in literature but popular in manuscripts: cf. entry Huanglianshangqingwan 黃連上清丸 “Pills with Rhizoma Coptidis to Clear the Upper Body” from Wansangaodan 丸散膏丹 “Pills Powders Plasters and Elixirs”, p. 54. – SBB‑PK: Slg. Unschuld 8002 (Retrieved from http://resolver.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/SBB0000601F00000054)
Despite such range, most of the formulas exhibit a profound degree of standardization throughout the collection in spite of the fact that the published record could not have provided a conduit of communication between the authors of the manuscripts. The fact that many such formulas appear on the TRT catalogue would in theory account for this. Huanglianshangqingwan is regularly appended with variants of the catalogue’s claim that it “treats overabundance/fullness of heat/fire in the triple burner” 治三焦實火. Fenqingwulinwan 分清五淋丸 “Clear-Turbid Five Stranguaries Pill” is a counterexample. Being absent from the TRT catalogue, practitioners would have had to find its application of “treating heat evil of the bladder and a swollen and painful penis” elsewhere, yet not only is its composition very consistent across documents, but this application does even repeat verbatim. Where did this formula come from, if not from medical literature? The most immediate possibility is: directly from the Qing court. Fenqingwulinwan appears in at least two modern reconstructed private intra-government diaries or formularies, where their applications to bladder diseases were the same, but their compositions were inconsistent. The ingredients from the Unschuld documents, though, draw from the common ingredients from the government formularies. There is a possibility that composition diffused from the imperial court.
A concordance between imperial court use and the practical literature of the Unschuld manuscripts would not be unexpected. Using Chen Keji’s 陈可冀 systematic cataloguing of court medical cases in the Qing, one can find many obscure military formulas in use both at court in the Qing and in the manuscripts, such as Wujisanwan 五積散丸 (for cold affliction in the stomach), Jinyiqushuwan 金衣祛暑丸 (dispelling summerheat and unseasonal qi), Jiuqiniantongwan 九氣拈痛丸 (heart problems). The Qing court regularly used highly obscure formulas it shared with its soldiers, completely bypassing its own orthodox medical compilation, the “Golden Mirror of Medical Orthodoxy” 醫宗金鑒. Fully three-quarters of Qing military drugs do not appear in it, and half were absent from the Golden Mirror and yet were still used at court. The question remains, was it really the big pharmacies which were accounting for this concordance?
Only one obscure military formula is in the best position to approach this question. Xijiaoshangqingwan 犀角上清丸 “Rhinoceros Horn Upper-Body-Clearing Pill” did not appear on the TRT catalogue, was used at court (to treat heat related diseases), and also appears among the Unschuld manuscripts. The only records of its composition are four internal formularies, where the composition profile is inconsistent with only a few overlapping ingredients. Nonetheless, when appearing in the Unschuld documents its applications always include the treatment of heat, and virtually all of its ingredients named in the Unschuld collection can be found in at least one of the surviving internal formularies. The implication is a tempting hypothesis: The Qing imperial court dictated to the Qing and later practical medical domain, by bypassing medical literature, through subsidizing the pharmaceutical industry and dispersing specific formulas through military distribution. It was the state, not the pharmacies, which enhanced drug profiles. More research is needed of course.
A counterpoint to this hypothesis would be the interesting case of Pinganwan 平安丸 “Peace and Security Pill”, certainly the most enigmatic formula of the early modern period. A simple search through the catalogues of the First Historical Archives of China will reveal that this formula was nearly omnipresent in the Qing official sector from approximately the Yongzheng Period (1722–1735), being distributed to civil officials, generals, bannermen, regular soldiers. No other medical formula appears more commonly in military distribution records or even in civil or court records.
Pinganwan appears on the TRT catalogue as a formula for treating a number of ailments, including “the nine kinds of heart pain” jiuzhongxintong 九種心痛 and a variety of gastrointestinal pains and disorders. However, because of its ubiquity in Qing government, a variety of archival sources reveal it had a wide variety of incompatible applications. It was sent to the Manchu general Fukanggan (1644–1766) in the Miao campaigns of the 1790s to help cure summerheat stroke. In Nepal in 1793, a thousand soldiers received the drug to combat miasmas. In 1729, an official received it for exposure to cold pathogen – probably a febrile disease. In 1722 Emperor Yongzheng himself cut straight to the point and just called it a wonder drug. This gets even more complicated in a case from 1759, when in Xinjiang, a memorial from the Manchu general Zhao Hui thanked the emperor for a conferral containing pinganwan and xianglianwan, both explicitly labelled “such medicines which cure blade and firearm wounds”. I can find only very limited evidence within any state or private sources suggesting pinganwan was used to treat wounds, especially ones identified so specifically. The only relatively well-known text pinganwan appears in is Ma Wenzhi’s 1892 collection on external medicine, which omits its application.
The mystery only compounds with the Unschuld collection, which has only a single entry of the drug, explicitly labeling it a “secret formula” mifang 秘方 and only very cursorily referencing aspects of its TRT description while giving only scant details of its composition. This is a departure from the normal experience when analyzing Qing military formulas in the Unschuld collection, which normally exhibit a reliable degree of standardization. However, in this case it is perhaps understandable as even Chen Keji could find no fewer than four separate recipes prevailing in the Qing period, each with highly inconsistent ingredients. The formula being in some sense secret cannot be an explanation for its inability to break out into larger discourse, as nothing could have been less of a secret in Qing government. At this point I speculate that the explanation lies at the top: Pinganwan was essentially a discretionary panacea, possibly influenced by the whims of imperial medical dilettantism, particularly of the emperor Yongzheng, who informally prescribed the drug to dozens of officials at a whim. Its resulting lack of standardization hampered any ability for it to circulate in the informally formatted system that was Qing practical medical discourse. This could explain how such a drug with such wide support from the state could have such a marginal impact outside of the state sector while allowing for the very real active correspondence between Qing medicine in government and in common medical practice. In the Qing, medical knowledge descended from state sectors via the military, but in many ways the halls of court, the offices of bureaucracy, and the garrisons of soldiers could each be their own medical worlds.
Vortrag im Rahmen von CrossAsia Talks am 20. 6. 2024
Trial für Asahi Shimbun Digital bis 19.12.24 | Trial for Asahi Shimbun Digital until December 19th 24
/in Aktuelle Testzugänge, Aktuelles/by Ursula FlacheFür registrierte Nutzer:innen steht bis zum 19. Dezember 2024 ein Testzugang zur japanischen Zeitung Asahi Shimbun Digital zur Verfügung. Um das Angebot zu testen, loggen Sie sich bitte wie üblich ein und nutzen Sie bitte den hier hinterlegten Link. Anschließend klicken Sie auf dem nächsten Bildschirm unbedingt auf「朝日新聞デジタルにアクセスする」und gelangen somit zu den Beiträgen. Nach der Recherche ist es zwingend notwendig, die Webseite rechts oben über「マイページ」und den im dortigen Pull Down Menü angebotenen Logout-Button wieder zu verlassen, da sonst unnötig Simultanzugriffe blockiert werden. Ein einfaches Schließen des Browsers beendet NICHT die Session beim Anbieter. Vielen Dank für die Kooperation!
Laut Aussage des Anbieters waren die Artikel der Papier- und der digitalen Ausgabe ursprünglich identisch. Inzwischen werden jedoch vermehrt eigenständige Artikel in der digitalen Ausgabe veröffentlicht, von denen nur 10-100 monatlich in die Datenbank Asahi Shimbun Cross-Search aufgenommen werden. Insofern sind die Inhalte von der im Trial angebotenen Asahi Shimbun Digital und der bereits für CrossAsia lizenzierten Datenbank Asahi Shimbun Cross-Search nicht völlig übereinstimmend.
Wenn Sie eine Fortführung der Asahi Shimbun Digital nach Ende des Trials befürworten, schreiben Sie uns bitte eine Rückmeldung an x-asia@sbb.spk-berlin.de. Ohne Ihr Feedback können wir nicht tätig werden! Vielen Dank für Ihr Engagement!
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Registered users can test access to the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun Digital until December 19th 2024. To test the offer, please log in as usual and use the link provided here. Then click on「朝日新聞デジタルにアクセスする」on the next screen to access the articles. After researching, it is absolutely necessary to leave the website via「マイページ」and use the logout button offered in the pull-down menu at the top right, as otherwise simultaneous access will be blocked unnecessarily. Simply closing the browser does NOT end the session with the provider. Thank you for your co-operation!
According to the provider, the articles in the paper and digital editions were originally identical. In the meantime, however, more and more independent articles are being published in the digital edition, of which only 10-100 are included in the Asahi Shimbun Cross-Search database each month. In this regard, the contents of the Asahi Shimbun Digital offered in the trial and the Asahi Shimbun Cross-Search database already licensed for CrossAsia are not completely identical.
If you are in favour of continuing Asahi Shimbun Digital after the trial ends, please write to us at x-asia@sbb.spk-berlin.de. We cannot take action without your feedback! Thank you for your commitment!
Military Drugs and Medical Texts: The Berlin Chinese Medical Manuscripts and Patterns of Consumption in the Mid to Late Qing
/in Aktuelles, CrossAsia Stipendiaten/by CrossAsiaGastbeitrag von Forrest Cale McSweeney
Herr Forrest Cale McSweeney, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, war im Rahmen des Stipendienprogramms der Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz im Jahr 2024 als Stipendiat an der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. Forschungsprojekt: „Military Drugs From Soldiers to Physicians“
Dieser Beitrag erschien zuerst auf dem Blog der Staatsbibliothek.
In the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912), military medicine, and particularly military drugs, were an aspect of the income of soldiers. In a complex system of local procurement, the Qing government steered both simple ingredients and physicians themselves to the privileged Manchu warrior elite in the Eight Banners often stationed in the far West, and likewise to regular soldiers in the Green Standard Armies. After the 1780s this procurement process was governed by the War Expenditures Regulations junxuzeli 軍需則例 (the Qing created specialized regulations called zeli 則例 for a variety of administrative domains). However, apart from this, the Qing emperors dispatched chengyao 成藥, or pre-prepared formulas, directly to soldiers throughout the empire through the honorary conferral system which had been a regular feature of government in imperial governments since the Tang Period (618–907).
Such pre-prepared formulas were the products of China’s new and enormous bulk of pharmaceutical industry. By the 18th century these firms had begun to aggressively publish and market their drugs directly to consumers, particularly through the circulation of their catalogues (yaomu 藥目). The most successful pharmacy and the one closest to the Qing government was the Tongrentang 同仁堂. Of the 95 formulas confirmed to have been distributed to Qing soldiers from the 18th through the 19th century, 47 appeared on the Tongrentang’s catalogue. This amounted to a virtual subsidy for the metropolitan pharmaceutical industry in the Qing.
This cuts against our typical understanding of medicine in the Qing, which according to most scholars became far less attached to the state both materially and discursively throughout late imperial China from the mid-Ming (1368–1644). But was the state merely an indirect player in this new scene? Is it possible that the Qing state’s drug distribution efforts actually enhanced the profile of some drugs over others, even over that of the efforts of the pharmaceutical industry? Moreover, what can the Berlin Library’s Unschuld collection, the “Chinese Medical Manuscripts”, add to this discussion? These roughly thousand manuscripts contain a wide variety of individually copied medical texts primarily intended for private or use within a closed system of associates and circulated only incidentally. They range from copies of esteemed medical classics to large numbers of recipe collections reflecting the individual inclinations of physicians often operating beneath the level of mainstream medical literature.
It has long been a suspicion by scholars that in the late imperial period, the classical medical tradition operated more often than not as a legitimizing veneer over a much more obscure level of practical discourse which, in practice, viewed classical medical systems established in the Han Period (202 BCE–220 CE) expediently. With the added variable of known military drugs, we can further develop and clarify this hypothesis. Was Chinese practical medical discourse organized in any systematic way? Were there obvious patterns of consumption and practice which point to the influence of institutions, including the state? We can start to answer these questions by first trying to create a clear indicator of the Qing state’s capacity to modify medical discourse, starting at the published literate level. With the use of digital humanities tools and including many open-source databases, it is possible to see in clear terms the profile specific formulas had in the published medical records. The big pharmacies like the Tongrentang did not limit themselves to formulas they themselves allegedly invented, but rather they also co-opted previously existing formulas from a wide variety of origins, sometimes medieval or even ancient. Comparing the incidence of military formulas vs. Tongrentang (TRT) formulas across time, reaching back to the Song‑Jin‑Yuan Period (SJY, 960–1368), all relative to a control group as a baseline, can begin to illustrate the relative power of the state to enhance the profile of a specific formula.
Nearly all formulas distributed by the Qing or sold by the TRT which ultimately came from the medieval period begin at a consistently low textual incidence of 1‑2 texts per formula during the SJY and remain flat until the mid-Ming, when printing in all literary fields exploded. TRT formulas show a tendency to increase over time from the Ming (3.2 texts per formula) to the end of the Qing (10.1) – a factor of 3.2, noticeably higher than control at 2.7. The Qing government, when distributing medieval-era formulas, tended to select from high profile formulas, which increase from 7.45 in the early Ming to 35.25 by the late Qing texts – a factor of 4.3. But the Qing government often distributed TRT formulas to Qing soldiers. Such hybrid formulas skyrocketed in Qing texts, increasing by a factor of 7.85. It seems from this that Qing military distribution could have acted as a multiplier on TRT formulas, but this can only be seen most clearly when comparing these against military formulas totally unaffiliated with the TRT, where the factor actually increases – to 8.3. The Qing government was just as strong a multiplier as the most famous pharmacy in China, if not stronger.
The Unschuld manuscripts provide a glimpse into the efforts by physicians by the late Qing and early republican periods to determine the composition of such popular formulas, as the great pharmacies tended only to publish their applications, not their compositions. Formulas which came from the Qing’s Imperial Medical Academy Taiyiyuan 太醫院 were only recorded semi-officially in the private intra-government diaries and formularies of the Taiyiyuan and Imperial Pharmacy Yuyaofang 御藥房 physicians, which remained unpublished until modern times.
One group of military formulas stands out in terms of their relevance to the collection. They are those formulas which have an extremely limited or even negligible presence in the larger historical-literary record, yet were nonetheless distributed to Qing soldiers. It is in the Unschuld collection where some of the only historical records exist of what precisely these formulas (in total 14) consisted of and what they were used for by physicians. If Qing military distribution was a significant multiplier to a formula’s profile, then why did these formulas remain relatively obscure and appear only in practical literature? Analyzing the Unschuld manuscripts for patterns against the assumption that military distribution affected the formulas’ profiles offers clues. Despite all having virtually no presence in mainstream texts, medical or otherwise, some formulas can still be incredibly common across the practical domain. The drug Huanglianshangqingwan 黃連上清丸 “Pills with Rhizoma Coptidis to Clear the Upper Body” is an example of this, being invisible in medical and historical literature yet appearing in 52 separate manuscripts. At the other extreme is “Depression-Overcoming Harmony-Preserving Pill” Yuejubaohewan 越菊保和丸, which appears in only two.
Formulas were often obscure in literature but popular in manuscripts: cf. entry Huanglianshangqingwan 黃連上清丸 “Pills with Rhizoma Coptidis to Clear the Upper Body” from Wansangaodan 丸散膏丹 “Pills Powders Plasters and Elixirs”, p. 54. – SBB‑PK: Slg. Unschuld 8002 (Retrieved from http://resolver.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/SBB0000601F00000054)
Despite such range, most of the formulas exhibit a profound degree of standardization throughout the collection in spite of the fact that the published record could not have provided a conduit of communication between the authors of the manuscripts. The fact that many such formulas appear on the TRT catalogue would in theory account for this. Huanglianshangqingwan is regularly appended with variants of the catalogue’s claim that it “treats overabundance/fullness of heat/fire in the triple burner” 治三焦實火. Fenqingwulinwan 分清五淋丸 “Clear-Turbid Five Stranguaries Pill” is a counterexample. Being absent from the TRT catalogue, practitioners would have had to find its application of “treating heat evil of the bladder and a swollen and painful penis” elsewhere, yet not only is its composition very consistent across documents, but this application does even repeat verbatim. Where did this formula come from, if not from medical literature? The most immediate possibility is: directly from the Qing court. Fenqingwulinwan appears in at least two modern reconstructed private intra-government diaries or formularies, where their applications to bladder diseases were the same, but their compositions were inconsistent. The ingredients from the Unschuld documents, though, draw from the common ingredients from the government formularies. There is a possibility that composition diffused from the imperial court.
A concordance between imperial court use and the practical literature of the Unschuld manuscripts would not be unexpected. Using Chen Keji’s 陈可冀 systematic cataloguing of court medical cases in the Qing, one can find many obscure military formulas in use both at court in the Qing and in the manuscripts, such as Wujisanwan 五積散丸 (for cold affliction in the stomach), Jinyiqushuwan 金衣祛暑丸 (dispelling summerheat and unseasonal qi), Jiuqiniantongwan 九氣拈痛丸 (heart problems). The Qing court regularly used highly obscure formulas it shared with its soldiers, completely bypassing its own orthodox medical compilation, the “Golden Mirror of Medical Orthodoxy” 醫宗金鑒. Fully three-quarters of Qing military drugs do not appear in it, and half were absent from the Golden Mirror and yet were still used at court. The question remains, was it really the big pharmacies which were accounting for this concordance?
Only one obscure military formula is in the best position to approach this question. Xijiaoshangqingwan 犀角上清丸 “Rhinoceros Horn Upper-Body-Clearing Pill” did not appear on the TRT catalogue, was used at court (to treat heat related diseases), and also appears among the Unschuld manuscripts. The only records of its composition are four internal formularies, where the composition profile is inconsistent with only a few overlapping ingredients. Nonetheless, when appearing in the Unschuld documents its applications always include the treatment of heat, and virtually all of its ingredients named in the Unschuld collection can be found in at least one of the surviving internal formularies. The implication is a tempting hypothesis: The Qing imperial court dictated to the Qing and later practical medical domain, by bypassing medical literature, through subsidizing the pharmaceutical industry and dispersing specific formulas through military distribution. It was the state, not the pharmacies, which enhanced drug profiles. More research is needed of course.
A counterpoint to this hypothesis would be the interesting case of Pinganwan 平安丸 “Peace and Security Pill”, certainly the most enigmatic formula of the early modern period. A simple search through the catalogues of the First Historical Archives of China will reveal that this formula was nearly omnipresent in the Qing official sector from approximately the Yongzheng Period (1722–1735), being distributed to civil officials, generals, bannermen, regular soldiers. No other medical formula appears more commonly in military distribution records or even in civil or court records.
Pinganwan appears on the TRT catalogue as a formula for treating a number of ailments, including “the nine kinds of heart pain” jiuzhongxintong 九種心痛 and a variety of gastrointestinal pains and disorders. However, because of its ubiquity in Qing government, a variety of archival sources reveal it had a wide variety of incompatible applications. It was sent to the Manchu general Fukanggan (1644–1766) in the Miao campaigns of the 1790s to help cure summerheat stroke. In Nepal in 1793, a thousand soldiers received the drug to combat miasmas. In 1729, an official received it for exposure to cold pathogen – probably a febrile disease. In 1722 Emperor Yongzheng himself cut straight to the point and just called it a wonder drug. This gets even more complicated in a case from 1759, when in Xinjiang, a memorial from the Manchu general Zhao Hui thanked the emperor for a conferral containing pinganwan and xianglianwan, both explicitly labelled “such medicines which cure blade and firearm wounds”. I can find only very limited evidence within any state or private sources suggesting pinganwan was used to treat wounds, especially ones identified so specifically. The only relatively well-known text pinganwan appears in is Ma Wenzhi’s 1892 collection on external medicine, which omits its application.
Widely circulated Pinganwan was all but unknown in wider medicine: cf. entry Pinganwan 平安丸 “Peace and Security Pill”, p. 109. – SBB-PK: Slg. Unschuld 8222 (Retrieved from http://resolver.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/SBB0000608E00000109)
The mystery only compounds with the Unschuld collection, which has only a single entry of the drug, explicitly labeling it a “secret formula” mifang 秘方 and only very cursorily referencing aspects of its TRT description while giving only scant details of its composition. This is a departure from the normal experience when analyzing Qing military formulas in the Unschuld collection, which normally exhibit a reliable degree of standardization. However, in this case it is perhaps understandable as even Chen Keji could find no fewer than four separate recipes prevailing in the Qing period, each with highly inconsistent ingredients. The formula being in some sense secret cannot be an explanation for its inability to break out into larger discourse, as nothing could have been less of a secret in Qing government. At this point I speculate that the explanation lies at the top: Pinganwan was essentially a discretionary panacea, possibly influenced by the whims of imperial medical dilettantism, particularly of the emperor Yongzheng, who informally prescribed the drug to dozens of officials at a whim. Its resulting lack of standardization hampered any ability for it to circulate in the informally formatted system that was Qing practical medical discourse. This could explain how such a drug with such wide support from the state could have such a marginal impact outside of the state sector while allowing for the very real active correspondence between Qing medicine in government and in common medical practice. In the Qing, medical knowledge descended from state sectors via the military, but in many ways the halls of court, the offices of bureaucracy, and the garrisons of soldiers could each be their own medical worlds.
Vortrag im Rahmen von CrossAsia Talks am 20. 6. 2024
Hackathon zur Layouterkennung tibetischer Handschriften und Blockdrucke
/in ITR und Entwicklungen, Veranstaltungen/by Antje ZiemerAm 22. November findet in Dresden ein Hackathon statt – und CrossAsia ist dabei!
Gemeinsamen mit Experten von Silicon Saxony und dem KI Netzwerk Dresden arbeiten wir an einer KI-basierten Layouterkennung für tibetische Handschriften und Blockdrucke. Es werden dabei leistungsstarke Modelle wie YOLO, SAM2 und GroundingDino zur automatischen Erkennung von Layouts und hier auch Illustrationen sowie Textinhalten benutzt. Im nächsten Schritt können Open-Source-Language-Models wie LLaMA 3.1 oder APIs (z.B. ChatGPT) eingesetzt werden, um die gesammelten Daten zu analysieren und Zusammenhänge zwischen Texten und Bildern zu erschließen. So können Lösungen für den automatischen Vergleich von Textinhalten in historischen Dokumenten und deren Annotation entwickelt werden.
Die Veranstaltung ist ideal für alle, die sich für den Einsatz von DH-Methoden und ihren Einsatz bei vormodernen Objekten interessieren.
Alle Infos im Überblick finden Sie auf der Webseite des Hackathons.
Eine kostenfreie Anmeldung ist hier möglich.
CrossAsia Talks: Gianna Pomata/Marta Hanson am 7.11.2024
/in Aktuelles, Veranstaltungen, Vortragsreihe "CrossAsia Talks"/by CrossAsia(See English below)
Wir möchten Ihnen den CrossAsia Talk mit dem Titel: “A Sample of Chinese Medicine for 17th-Century Europe” von Gianna Pomata und Marta Hanson ankündigen. Er wird am 7. November 2024 ab 18 Uhr (UTC+1) online stattfinden. Sie werden darstellen, wie Ideen der traditionellen chinesischen Medizin im 17. Jahrhundert ihren Weg nach Europa gefunden haben und wie der Wissenstransfer zu jener Zeit funktionierte.
Our lecture will focus on a book that played a key role in the introduction of Chinese medicine to Europe: Specimen Medicinae Sinicae sive Opuscula Medica ad Mentem Sinensium (A Sample of Chinese Medicine, or Brief Medical Works According to the Mind of the Chinese: Frankfurt am Main, 1682). The only extant manuscript of this book and some preparatory materials are held at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. Specimen included various writings, some presented as translation from the Chinese into Latin. Equipped with illustrations drawn from Chinese sources, the book dealt with basic Chinese physiological, anatomical, and therapeutic notions, mostly related to pulse medicine. No European authors or translators were acknowledged, except for the editor Andreas Cleyer, a German medical practitioner in the service of the Dutch East India Company in Batavia (present-day Jakarta).
In our lecture, we will describe our collaborative research on this text. Many questions were still unanswered when we started our project. Who wrote Specimen? Who translated the Chinese texts included in it? Centuries of controversies had obscured Specimen’s authorship. Recent research, including our own, has indicated with reasonable certainty that the Jesuit China missionaries Michael Boym and Philippe Couplet translated or otherwise wrote most of the texts assembled in Specimen. We have also identified some of the Chinese writings chosen for translation and we have compared these Chinese originals with their Latin rendering. Finally, we have traced Specimen’s journey from China, where the book was written, to Dutch Batavia, where the manuscript was lost and found, to Frankfurt, where it was finally published. The appearance of the book in Europe required the transnational collaboration of three sets of people across the globe: some Jesuits in the China mission, such as Boym and Couplet, who authored the translations; a medical practitioner of the Dutch East India Company in Batavia, Andreas Cleyer, who collected fragments of their work; and on the receiving end of the network, an association of learned physicians, the German Academia naturae curiosorum, who sponsored the publication.
Die Vortragssprache ist Englisch. Bei Fragen kontaktieren Sie uns gern über folgende Mailadresse: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de. Die Veranstaltung wird aufgezeichnet.*
Der Vortrag wird via Webex gestreamt und aufgezeichnet. Sie können am Vortrag über Ihren Browser ohne Installation einer Software teilnehmen. Klicken Sie dazu unten auf „Zum Vortrag“, folgen dem Link „Über Browser teilnehmen“ und geben Ihren Namen ein.
Alle bislang angekündigten Vorträge finden Sie hier. Die weiteren Termine kündigen wir in unserem Blog und auf unserem X-Account an.
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We would like to announce the CrossAsia Talk entitled: “A Sample of Chinese Medicine for 17th-Century Europe” by Gianna Pomata and Marta Hanson. It will take place online on November 7, 2024 from 6 pm (UTC+1). They will discuss how ideas of traditional Chinese medicine first came to Europe in the 17th century and how the transfer of knowledge worked at that time.
Our lecture will focus on a book that played a key role in the introduction of Chinese medicine to Europe: Specimen Medicinae Sinicae sive Opuscula Medica ad Mentem Sinensium (A Sample of Chinese Medicine, or Brief Medical Works According to the Mind of the Chinese: Frankfurt am Main, 1682). The only extant manuscript of this book and some preparatory materials are held at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. Specimen included various writings, some presented as translation from the Chinese into Latin. Equipped with illustrations drawn from Chinese sources, the book dealt with basic Chinese physiological, anatomical, and therapeutic notions, mostly related to pulse medicine. No European authors or translators were acknowledged, except for the editor Andreas Cleyer, a German medical practitioner in the service of the Dutch East India Company in Batavia (present-day Jakarta).
In our lecture, we will describe our collaborative research on this text. Many questions were still unanswered when we started our project. Who wrote Specimen? Who translated the Chinese texts included in it? Centuries of controversies had obscured Specimen’s authorship. Recent research, including our own, has indicated with reasonable certainty that the Jesuit China missionaries Michael Boym and Philippe Couplet translated or otherwise wrote most of the texts assembled in Specimen. We have also identified some of the Chinese writings chosen for translation and we have compared these Chinese originals with their Latin rendering. Finally, we have traced Specimen’s journey from China, where the book was written, to Dutch Batavia, where the manuscript was lost and found, to Frankfurt, where it was finally published. The appearance of the book in Europe required the transnational collaboration of three sets of people across the globe: some Jesuits in the China mission, such as Boym and Couplet, who authored the translations; a medical practitioner of the Dutch East India Company in Batavia, Andreas Cleyer, who collected fragments of their work; and on the receiving end of the network, an association of learned physicians, the German Academia naturae curiosorum, who sponsored the publication.
The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, please contact us at the following e-mail address: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de. The event will be filmed.*
The lecture will be streamed via Webex. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the respective button “To the lecture” below, follow the link “join via browser” (“über Browser teilnehmen”), and enter your name.
You can find all previously announced lectures here. We will announce further dates in our blog and on X.
*Mit Ihrer Teilnahme an der Veranstaltung räumen Sie der Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz und ihren nachgeordneten Einrichtungen kostenlos alle Nutzungsrechte an den Bildern/Videos ein, die während der Veranstaltung von Ihnen angefertigt wurden. Dies schließt auch die kommerzielle Nutzung ein. Diese Einverständniserklärung gilt räumlich und zeitlich unbeschränkt und für die Nutzung in allen Medien, sowohl für analoge als auch für digitale Verwendungen. Sie umfasst auch die Bildbearbeitung sowie die Verwendung der Bilder für Montagen. / By participating, you grant the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and its subordinate institutions free of charge all rights of usage of pictures and videos taken of you during this lecture presentation. This declaration of consent is valid in terms of time and space without restrictions and for usage in all media, including analogue and digital usage. It includes image processing and the usage of photos in composite illustrations. German law will apply.
CrossAsia Classroom: Online-Seminare im Wintersemester 2024/25
/in Aktuelles, Schulungen/by CrossAsiaAuch im Wintersemester 2024/25 lädt das CrossAsia-Team Sie wieder zu zahlreichen Online-Schulung zu unseren hauseigenen Angeboten ein. Neben Schulungen zu den Besonderheiten der einzelnen Regionen (China, Japan, Korea, Südostasien und Zentralasien) wird es auch wieder Schulungen zu einzelnen Datenbanken geben. Zum ersten Mal bieten wir eine Schulung rund um das CrossAsia Repository an.
Die Schulungen beginnen am 22.10. mit einer Einführung zu Zentralasien. Das vollständige Programm des CrossAsia Classrooms finden Sie hier sowie unter der Rubrik “Wissenswerkstatt” im Veranstaltungskalender der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin hier.
Auf der CrossAsia Classroom-Seite finden Sie außerdem aktuelles Infomaterial zu den einzelnen Regionen und Links zu unseren CrossAsia Tutorials.
Fall Sie als Institution ein auf Sie und ihr Publikum zugeschnittenes Web-Seminare kostenfrei buchen möchten, können Sie sich gerne über xasia@sbb.spk-berlin.de mit uns in Verbindung setzen oder direkt unsere regionalen Referent:innen dahingehend kontaktieren. Gerne kommen wir auch zu Ihnen, um Schulungen Live vor Ort abzuhalten.
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In the winter semester 2024/25, the CrossAsia team once again invites you to numerous online training courses on our in-house services. In addition to training courses on the special features of the individual regions (China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia and Central Asia), there will also be training courses on individual databases. For the first time, we are offering training on the CrossAsia Repository.
The training will start on 22 October with an introduction to Central Asia. The full programme of the CrossAsia Classroom can be found here and under the category ‘Wissenswerkstatt’ in the event calendar of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin here.
On the CrossAsia Classroom page you will also find up-to-date information material on the individual regions and links to our CrossAsia tutorials.
If you are an institution and would like to book a web seminar tailored to you and your audience free of charge, you are welcome to contact us at xasia@sbb.spk-berlin.de or contact our regional specialists directly. We are also happy to come to you to hold training courses live on site.
CrossAsia Talks: Franz Xaver Erhard 12.12.2024
/in Veranstaltungen, Vortragsreihe "CrossAsia Talks"/by CrossAsia(See English below)
Wir beschließen das Jahr mit einem CrossAsia Talk von Dr. Franz Xaver Erhard (Universität Leipzig) am 12. Dezember 2024 ab 18 Uhr (MEZ) mit dem Titel: From Print to Digital: Making Available Tibetan Newspapers as a Historical Source. Herr Erhard wird das Forschungsprojekt Divergent Discourses vorstellen und insbesondere auf die Verwendung und Bedeutung von Digital Humanities-Methoden in seiner Forschung eingehen. Der Vortrag wird online stattfinden.
The Sino-Tibetan history of the 1950s and 1960s is relatively unknown and highly contested. At the same time, sources on the period are scarce and local archives – if they exist – are generally closed to outside researchers. The few existing collections, including the one at the Berlin State Library (german: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin), of Tibetan newsprint and contemporary publications offer rare insights into the events but also the official presentation of events at the very time when they were taking place. The UK-German research project Divergent Discourses takes up this opportunity to study the events and narratives in newspapers of the period to understand how they became woven into cohesive yet diverging discourses on Tibet.
In the field of Tibetan Studies, Digital Humanities approaches are just emerging, and often the most essential tools are still wanted – the Divergent Discourses project has grappled with a multitude of challenges to digitisation posed by the Tibetan language and script, the complexity of newspaper layout, and the lack of Natural Language Processing tools for Tibetan and thus adapted existing or created new tools to build a workflow for the digitisation and analysis of a modern Tibetan text corpus.
The presentation will showcase the Divergent Discourses project’s approaches and Digital Humanities tools geared to unlock a large corpus of Tibetan historical newspapers for the first time as a source for a historical study of the emergence and development of conflicting concepts, ideas and discourse strategies.
Die Vortragssprache ist Englisch. Bei Fragen kontaktieren Sie uns unter: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.
Der Vortrag wird darüber hinaus via Webex gestreamt und aufgezeichnet*. Sie können am Vortrag über Ihren Browser ohne Installation einer Software teilnehmen. Klicken Sie dazu unten auf „Zum Vortrag“, folgen dem Link „Über Browser teilnehmen“ und geben Ihren Namen ein.
Alle bislang angekündigten Vorträge finden Sie hier. Die weiteren Termine kündigen wir in unserem Blog und auf unserem X-Account an.
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We will end the year with a CrossAsia Talk by Dr. Franz Xaver Erhard (Leipzig University) on December 12, 2024 from 6 pm (CET) entitled: From Print to Digital: Making Available Tibetan Newspapers as a Historical Source. Mr Erhard will present the Divergent Discourses research project and in particular discuss the use and significance of digital humanities methods in his research. The lecture will take place online.
The Sino-Tibetan history of the 1950s and 1960s is relatively unknown and highly contested. At the same time, sources on the period are scarce and local archives – if they exist – are generally closed to outside researchers. The few existing collections, including the one at the Berlin State Library (german: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin), of Tibetan newsprint and contemporary publications offer rare insights into the events but also the official presentation of events at the very time when they were taking place. The UK-German research project Divergent Discourses takes up this opportunity to study the events and narratives in newspapers of the period to understand how they became woven into cohesive yet diverging discourses on Tibet.
In the field of Tibetan Studies, Digital Humanities approaches are just emerging, and often the most essential tools are still wanted – the Divergent Discourses project has grappled with a multitude of challenges to digitisation posed by the Tibetan language and script, the complexity of newspaper layout, and the lack of Natural Language Processing tools for Tibetan and thus adapted existing or created new tools to build a workflow for the digitisation and analysis of a modern Tibetan text corpus.
The presentation will showcase the Divergent Discourses project’s approaches and Digital Humanities tools geared to unlock a large corpus of Tibetan historical newspapers for the first time as a source for a historical study of the emergence and development of conflicting concepts, ideas and discourse strategies.
The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, please contact us: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.
The lecture will also be streamed and recorded via Webex*. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the respective button “To the lecture” below, follow the link “join via browser” (“über Browser teilnehmen”), and enter your name.
You can find all previously announced lectures here. We will announce further dates in our blog and on X.
*Mit Ihrer Teilnahme an der Veranstaltung räumen Sie der Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz und ihren nachgeordneten Einrichtungen kostenlos alle Nutzungsrechte an den Bildern/Videos ein, die während der Veranstaltung von Ihnen angefertigt wurden. Dies schließt auch die kommerzielle Nutzung ein. Diese Einverständniserklärung gilt räumlich und zeitlich unbeschränkt und für die Nutzung in allen Medien, sowohl für analoge als auch für digitale Verwendungen. Sie umfasst auch die Bildbearbeitung sowie die Verwendung der Bilder für Montagen. / By participating, you grant the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and its subordinate institutions free of charge all rights of usage of pictures and videos taken of you during this lecture presentation. This declaration of consent is valid in terms of time and space without restrictions and for usage in all media, including analogue and digital usage. It includes image processing and the usage of photos in composite illustrations. German law will apply.
Neue Datenbanken zu historischen Zeitungen aus Taiwan
/in Aktuelles, Datenbanken, Erwerbungen/by Duncan Paterson(english below)
Wir freuen uns Euch/Ihnen mitteilen zu können, dass der FID Asien zwei neue Datenbanken des Anbieters TBMC zu historischen Zeitungen aus Taiwan lizenziert hat.
Umfasst mehr als 144.600 amtliche Aufzeichnungen die zwischen August 1896 und April 1942 während der japanischen Herrschaft über Taiwan entstanden sind. Die umfangreiche Volltextsuche erstreckt sich auch auf Tabellen und Graphiken.
58 Zeitschriften gewähren Einblicke in unterschiedliche Themenbereiche der Geschichte Taiwans während der japanischen Besatzungszeit. Über eine Metadatensuche gelangt man zu hochwertigen Scans der Periodika.
Viel Spaß beim Stöbern.
Euer / Ihr
CrossAsia Team
We are pleased to inform you that FID Asia has licensed two new databases from the provider TBMC on historical newspapers from Taiwan.
Includes more than 144,600 official records created between August 1896 and April 1942 during Japanese rule over Taiwan.
58 periodicals provide insights into various subject areas of Taiwan’s history during the Japanese occupation. A metadata search provides access to high-quality scans of the periodicals.
Enjoy browsing
Your
CrossAsia Team
CrossAsia Talks: Vladimir Glomb 17.10.2024
/in Aktuelles, Veranstaltungen, Vortragsreihe "CrossAsia Talks"/by CrossAsia(See English below)
Am 17. Oktober ab 18 Uhr wird Herr Prof. Dr. Vladimir Glomb (Freie Universität Berlin) in seinem Onlinevortrag “The Master said (in Korean)…: Vernacular exegesis (ŏnhae) and Confucian classics” einen Einblick in seine Forschung zu koreanischen Übersetzungsstrategien aus dem Chinesischen anhand der Vier Bücher aus dem Bestand der Staatsbibliothek geben.
The so-called Sasŏ ŏnhae 四書諺解 (Vernacular Exegesis of the Four Books) 1820 edition from the Coreanica collection of the Berlin State Library (shelfmark Libri cor. 12) is a fine example of texts illustrating problems related to language strategies employed by Chosŏn state and literati in rendering texts written in the Classical Chinese into their vernacular versions. The present talk will focus on the purpose, authority, and canonicity of these vernacular versions of the Confucian classics. Through the analysis of materials from the Four Books (Daxue, Lunyu, Mengzi, Zhongyong), we will try to detect the motivations behind the commissioning of these texts, the translation strategies employed, and, above all, the success or failure of their supposed goal to make Classical Chinese texts more accessible to a less educated audience.
Die Vortragssprache ist Englisch. Bei Fragen kontaktieren Sie uns unter: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.
Der Vortrag wird via Webex gestreamt*. Sie können am Vortrag über Ihren Browser ohne Installation einer Software teilnehmen. Klicken Sie dazu unten auf „Zum Vortrag“, folgen dem Link „Über Browser teilnehmen“ und geben Ihren Namen ein.
Alle bislang angekündigten Vorträge finden Sie hier. Die weiteren Termine kündigen wir in unserem Blog und auf unserem X-Account an.
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On 17 October at 6 pm, Prof. Dr Vladimir Glomb (Freie Universität Berlin) will give an online lecture entitled “The Master said (in Korean)…: Vernacular exegesis (ŏnhae) and Confucian classics” will give an insight into his research on Korean translation strategies from Chinese using the Four Books from the State Library’s collection.
The so-called Sasŏ ŏnhae 四書諺解 (Vernacular Exegesis of the Four Books) 1820 edition from the Coreanica collection of the Berlin State Library (shelfmark Libri cor. 12) is a fine example of texts illustrating problems related to language strategies employed by Chosŏn state and literati in rendering texts written in the Classical Chinese into their vernacular versions. The present talk will focus on the purpose, authority, and canonicity of these vernacular versions of the Confucian classics. Through the analysis of materials from the Four Books (Daxue, Lunyu, Mengzi, Zhongyong), we will try to detect the motivations behind the commissioning of these texts, the translation strategies employed, and, above all, the success or failure of their supposed goal to make Classical Chinese texts more accessible to a less educated audience.
The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, please contact us: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.
The lecture will be streamed via Webex*. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the respective button “To the lecture” below, follow the link “join via browser” (“über Browser teilnehmen”), and enter your name.
You can find all previously announced lectures here. We will announce further dates in our blog and on X.
*Mit Ihrer Teilnahme an der Veranstaltung räumen Sie der Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz und ihren nachgeordneten Einrichtungen kostenlos alle Nutzungsrechte an den Bildern/Videos ein, die während der Veranstaltung von Ihnen angefertigt wurden. Dies schließt auch die kommerzielle Nutzung ein. Diese Einverständniserklärung gilt räumlich und zeitlich unbeschränkt und für die Nutzung in allen Medien, sowohl für analoge als auch für digitale Verwendungen. Sie umfasst auch die Bildbearbeitung sowie die Verwendung der Bilder für Montagen. / By participating, you grant the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and its subordinate institutions free of charge all rights of usage of pictures and videos taken of you during this lecture presentation. This declaration of consent is valid in terms of time and space without restrictions and for usage in all media, including analogue and digital usage. It includes image processing and the usage of photos in composite illustrations. German law will apply.
CrossAsia Talks: Barbara Wall 26.09.2024
/in Newsletter 32, Veranstaltungen, Vortragsreihe "CrossAsia Talks"/by CrossAsia(See English below)
In ihrem am Donnerstag, den 26.09.2024 ab 18 Uhr, stattfindenden Vortrag “The Dynamic Essence of Transmedia Storytelling: A Graphical Approach to the Journey to the West in Korea” wird Frau Dr. Barbara Wall (Universität Kopenhagen) auf den im chinesischen Raum bekannten Roman “Die Reise nach Westen” in verschiedenen Kunstformen im Kontext der koreanischen Version eingehen. Der Vortrag ist als Booktalk konzipiert, der sich auf ihre soeben erschienene Monographie bezieht.
This talk challenges many typical assumptions about popular literary classics via analysis of sixty Korean variations of The Journey to the West, including novels and poems, but also films, comics, paintings, and dance performances. In contrast to the typical assumption that literary classics like The Journey to the West are stable texts with a single original, Barbara Wall approaches The Journey to the West as a dynamic text comprised of all its variations. From Korean scholars in the 14th century to boy bands like Seventeen in the 21st century, she argues that all the creators of such variations participate in the ongoing story world known as The Journey. Wall employs literary and quantitative analysis, ample graphic visualizations, and in-depth descriptions of classroom games to find new ways to understand the dynamics of transmedia storytelling and popular engagement with story worlds.
Die Vortragssprache ist Englisch. Bei Fragen kontaktieren Sie uns unter: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.
Der Vortrag wird via Webex gestreamt.* Sie können am Vortrag über Ihren Browser ohne Installation einer Software teilnehmen. Klicken Sie dazu unten auf „Zum Vortrag“, folgen dem Link „Über Browser teilnehmen“ und geben Ihren Namen ein.
Alle bislang angekündigten Vorträge finden Sie hier. Die weiteren Termine kündigen wir in unserem Blog und auf unserem X-Account an.
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In her lecture “The Dynamic Essence of Transmedia Storytelling: A Graphical Approach to the Journey to the West in Korea”, which will take place on Thursday, 26.09.2024 from 6 pm, Dr. Barbara Wall (University of Copenhagen) will discuss the well-known Chinese novel “The Journey to the West” in various art forms in the context of the Korean version. The lecture is designed as a booktalk based on her recently published monograph.
This talk challenges many typical assumptions about popular literary classics via analysis of sixty Korean variations of The Journey to the West, including novels and poems, but also films, comics, paintings, and dance performances. In contrast to the typical assumption that literary classics like The Journey to the West are stable texts with a single original, Barbara Wall approaches The Journey to the West as a dynamic text comprised of all its variations. From Korean scholars in the 14th century to boy bands like Seventeen in the 21st century, she argues that all the creators of such variations participate in the ongoing story world known as The Journey. Wall employs literary and quantitative analysis, ample graphic visualizations, and in-depth descriptions of classroom games to find new ways to understand the dynamics of transmedia storytelling and popular engagement with story worlds.
The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, please contact us: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.
The lecture will be streamed via Webex*. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the respective button “To the lecture” below, follow the link “join via browser” (“über Browser teilnehmen”), and enter your name.
You can find all previously announced lectures here. We will announce further dates in our blog and on X.
*Mit Ihrer Teilnahme an der Veranstaltung räumen Sie der Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz und ihren nachgeordneten Einrichtungen kostenlos alle Nutzungsrechte an den Bildern/Videos ein, die während der Veranstaltung von Ihnen angefertigt wurden. Dies schließt auch die kommerzielle Nutzung ein. Diese Einverständniserklärung gilt räumlich und zeitlich unbeschränkt und für die Nutzung in allen Medien, sowohl für analoge als auch für digitale Verwendungen. Sie umfasst auch die Bildbearbeitung sowie die Verwendung der Bilder für Montagen. / By participating, you grant the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and its subordinate institutions free of charge all rights of usage of pictures and videos taken of you during this lecture presentation. This declaration of consent is valid in terms of time and space without restrictions and for usage in all media, including analogue and digital usage. It includes image processing and the usage of photos in composite illustrations. German law will apply.
PLA daily 解放军报 (1956-2023) im Testzugang: verlängert bis zum 30.11.2024!
/in Aktuelles, Uncategorized/by Martina SiebertWir können CrossAsia-Nutzer:innen ab sofort für einen Monat einen Testzugang zum kompletten Bestand der chinesischsprachigen People’s Liberation Army Daily (1.1.1956 bis zum 31.12.2032) anbieten.
Kurzvorstellung der Anbieters: “The People’s Liberation Army Daily, 解放军报, (PLA Daily) published since 1956, stands as a rich repository of military news and related information emanating from China’s authoritative military establishment. As the official newspaper of the Central Military Commission, the PLA Daily not only chronicles the evolving narrative of China’s military affairs but also extends into broader policy realms, mirroring and influencing public discourse in alignment with the Chinese Communist Party’s ideological framework. Owned and operated by the Political Work Department of the Central Military Commission, PLA Daily, with its vast collection of editorials, news stories, and military communications, presents a robust academic and analytical platform for scholars, policy analysts, and anyone keen on exploring the military narrative of China from the heart of its official military media outlet.”
Das Portal bietet eine Volltextsuche in den über 900.000 Artikeln. Scans und Fotos sind nicht eingebunden, dafür ist das Angebot Teil eines Projekts automatisierte englische Übersetzungen für die Artikel anzubieten. Durchsuchbar ist das schon, d.h. man kann auf *Englisch* suchen, um Ergebnisse für das *chinesischen* Original zu bekommen.
Hier geht’s zur Datenbank: http://erf.sbb.spk-berlin.de/han/pla-daily/
(Hinweis: Da nur im Testzugang, erscheint die Datenbank nicht in der CrossAsia Datenbankliste)
Viel Spaß beim Ausprobieren und mit der Bitte um Feedback an x-asia über Nutzbarkeit, Nützlichkeit etc.
Viele Grüße,
Martina Siebert für CrossAsia