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TZID:Asia/Hong_Kong
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DTSTART:20250101T000000
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20251104T123000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20251104T133000
DTSTAMP:20261028T090658
CREATED:20260228T123226Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260416T102955Z
UID:97975-1762259400-1762263000@ihss.hku.hk
SUMMARY:“Middle Women Rising (zhongnü jueqi)”: Framing Gendered Spiritual Empowerment in Contemporary China
DESCRIPTION:Table of Contents			\n										\n				\n					\n				\n			\n							\n		\n						\n				\n				\n		\n				\n				\n					Abstract				\n				\n							\n						\n				\n									The highlands of the Southeast Asian Massif and adjacent Southwest China constitute one of the most persistent geographies of ignorance in the human sciences — quartered between competing area studies disciplines\, divided by postcolonial sovereign borders\, and silenced by archives that encode colonial and dynastic optics while systematically excluding highland perspectives. This presentation takes the measure of that gap for the Upper Mekong borderlands during the period 1890–1910\, a moment when British and French imperial rivalry over access to Yunnan’s markets sent successive survey missions through terrain already structured by centuries of indigenous commerce. Drawing on the diaries and survey reports of French and British explorers alongside Yao oral traditions and written records\, the presentation reconstructs overland and riverine trade networks\, identifies key commercial hubs\, and maps the active circulation of peoples and commodities across the borderlands converging on Luang Namtha\, North Laos — a regional node whose historical significance has been largely invisible in the existing literature. Colonial and indigenous sources are read as complementary archives: the former documenting the infrastructure of movement from the outside; the latter testifying to its social and textual life from within. Two contributions anchor the argument. The first is a new cartographic reconstruction of trade routes\, hubs\, and commodity flows — mules\, silver\, opium\, cotton\, salt\, and compressed tea — that surfaces a borderland the Yunnan Myth rendered invisible. The second is a previously untranslated Lanten Yao treatise on equine maladies and remedies (1846 or 1906) that ended its journey in Luang Namtha\, testifying materially to a moment when horses were indispensable to highland mobility. That the treatise carries an explicit injunction restricting its own circulation reveals the social logic governing the movement of knowledge along these routes: manuscripts traveled the same circuits as commodities\, with their restricted exchange encoding the value\, vulnerability\, and social stakes of the networks this presentation seeks to recover. 								\n				\n				\n				\n					About the Speaker				\n				\n				\n				\n									Dr. Joseba Estevez is a social anthropologist and Research Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HKU). His historical research reconstructs the commercial and manuscript circulation networks of the Southeast Asian Massif\, tracing the overland and riverine trade routes\, caravan economies\, and textual exchanges that connected Southwest China\, northern Laos\, Burma\, Vietnam\, and Thailand across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This work draws on colonial survey reports\, indigenous oral traditions\, and a corpus of Lanten Yao manuscripts written in Classical Chinese script — among the richest surviving textual records produced by any highland society in the region. Over more than a decade of fieldwork in Luang Namtha Province\, northern Laos\, Estevez worked directly with Lanten Yao (Mun) communities whose Daoist ritual specialists preserved and transmitted texts along the same caravan routes that carried silver\, opium\, cotton\, and horses across the borderlands. His research on Lanten Yao ritual expertise earned the 2024 Frobenius Research Award\, the premier honor for anthropological scholarship in the German-speaking world. He leads the YAO DAO Project at HKU and has directed major archival initiatives — including the Digital Library of the Lanten Textual Heritage (British Library\, 2015–2021; Heidelberg 2023; Leiden 2027) — mapping Daoist manuscript exchange networks across the nineteenth-century Southeast Asian Massif. 								\n				\n				\n				\n					About the Interdisciplinary Research Seminar 				\n				\n				\n				\n									This series aims to introduce a wide range of cutting-edge research in various disciplines and areas. If you have any questions about this seminar or would be interested in giving a talk\, please contact Professor Chun Fung Tong (tong.chunfung@hku.hk).
URL:https://ihss.hku.hk/events/middle-women-rising-zhongnu-jueqi-framing-gendered-spiritual-empowerment-in-contemporary-china/
LOCATION:201\, May Hall\, The University of Hong Kong\, or Via Zoom
CATEGORIES:Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ihss.hku.hk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/image-32.jpeg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20251107T090000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20251107T100000
DTSTAMP:20261028T090658
CREATED:20260228T122548Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260416T102823Z
UID:97969-1762506000-1762509600@ihss.hku.hk
SUMMARY:Sideline or Factory: Locating Socialist Flexibility in Export Lacemaking Industries
DESCRIPTION:Table of Contents			\n										\n				\n					\n				\n			\n							\n		\n						\n				\n				\n		\n				\n				\n					Abstract				\n				\n				\n				\n									The highlands of the Southeast Asian Massif and adjacent Southwest China constitute one of the most persistent geographies of ignorance in the human sciences — quartered between competing area studies disciplines\, divided by postcolonial sovereign borders\, and silenced by archives that encode colonial and dynastic optics while systematically excluding highland perspectives. This presentation takes the measure of that gap for the Upper Mekong borderlands during the period 1890–1910\, a moment when British and French imperial rivalry over access to Yunnan’s markets sent successive survey missions through terrain already structured by centuries of indigenous commerce. Drawing on the diaries and survey reports of French and British explorers alongside Yao oral traditions and written records\, the presentation reconstructs overland and riverine trade networks\, identifies key commercial hubs\, and maps the active circulation of peoples and commodities across the borderlands converging on Luang Namtha\, North Laos — a regional node whose historical significance has been largely invisible in the existing literature. Colonial and indigenous sources are read as complementary archives: the former documenting the infrastructure of movement from the outside; the latter testifying to its social and textual life from within. Two contributions anchor the argument. The first is a new cartographic reconstruction of trade routes\, hubs\, and commodity flows — mules\, silver\, opium\, cotton\, salt\, and compressed tea — that surfaces a borderland the Yunnan Myth rendered invisible. The second is a previously untranslated Lanten Yao treatise on equine maladies and remedies (1846 or 1906) that ended its journey in Luang Namtha\, testifying materially to a moment when horses were indispensable to highland mobility. That the treatise carries an explicit injunction restricting its own circulation reveals the social logic governing the movement of knowledge along these routes: manuscripts traveled the same circuits as commodities\, with their restricted exchange encoding the value\, vulnerability\, and social stakes of the networks this presentation seeks to recover. 								\n				\n				\n				\n					About the Speaker				\n				\n				\n				\n									Dr. Joseba Estevez is a social anthropologist and Research Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HKU). His historical research reconstructs the commercial and manuscript circulation networks of the Southeast Asian Massif\, tracing the overland and riverine trade routes\, caravan economies\, and textual exchanges that connected Southwest China\, northern Laos\, Burma\, Vietnam\, and Thailand across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This work draws on colonial survey reports\, indigenous oral traditions\, and a corpus of Lanten Yao manuscripts written in Classical Chinese script — among the richest surviving textual records produced by any highland society in the region. Over more than a decade of fieldwork in Luang Namtha Province\, northern Laos\, Estevez worked directly with Lanten Yao (Mun) communities whose Daoist ritual specialists preserved and transmitted texts along the same caravan routes that carried silver\, opium\, cotton\, and horses across the borderlands. His research on Lanten Yao ritual expertise earned the 2024 Frobenius Research Award\, the premier honor for anthropological scholarship in the German-speaking world. He leads the YAO DAO Project at HKU and has directed major archival initiatives — including the Digital Library of the Lanten Textual Heritage (British Library\, 2015–2021; Heidelberg 2023; Leiden 2027) — mapping Daoist manuscript exchange networks across the nineteenth-century Southeast Asian Massif. 								\n				\n				\n				\n					About the Interdisciplinary Research Seminar 				\n				\n				\n				\n									This series aims to introduce a wide range of cutting-edge research in various disciplines and areas. If you have any questions about this seminar or would be interested in giving a talk\, please contact Professor Chun Fung Tong (tong.chunfung@hku.hk).
URL:https://ihss.hku.hk/events/sideline-or-factory-locating-socialist-flexibility-in-export-lacemaking-industries/
LOCATION:Via Zoom
CATEGORIES:Chinese Business History,Chinese Business History Webinar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ihss.hku.hk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/image-30.jpeg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20251111T110000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20251111T120000
DTSTAMP:20261028T090658
CREATED:20260228T103425Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260416T102955Z
UID:97963-1762858800-1762862400@ihss.hku.hk
SUMMARY:Religion\, Secularism\, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China
DESCRIPTION:Table of Contents			\n										\n				\n					\n				\n			\n							\n		\n						\n				\n				\n		\n				\n				\n					Abstract				\n				\n				\n				\n									The highlands of the Southeast Asian Massif and adjacent Southwest China constitute one of the most persistent geographies of ignorance in the human sciences — quartered between competing area studies disciplines\, divided by postcolonial sovereign borders\, and silenced by archives that encode colonial and dynastic optics while systematically excluding highland perspectives. This presentation takes the measure of that gap for the Upper Mekong borderlands during the period 1890–1910\, a moment when British and French imperial rivalry over access to Yunnan’s markets sent successive survey missions through terrain already structured by centuries of indigenous commerce. Drawing on the diaries and survey reports of French and British explorers alongside Yao oral traditions and written records\, the presentation reconstructs overland and riverine trade networks\, identifies key commercial hubs\, and maps the active circulation of peoples and commodities across the borderlands converging on Luang Namtha\, North Laos — a regional node whose historical significance has been largely invisible in the existing literature. Colonial and indigenous sources are read as complementary archives: the former documenting the infrastructure of movement from the outside; the latter testifying to its social and textual life from within. Two contributions anchor the argument. The first is a new cartographic reconstruction of trade routes\, hubs\, and commodity flows — mules\, silver\, opium\, cotton\, salt\, and compressed tea — that surfaces a borderland the Yunnan Myth rendered invisible. The second is a previously untranslated Lanten Yao treatise on equine maladies and remedies (1846 or 1906) that ended its journey in Luang Namtha\, testifying materially to a moment when horses were indispensable to highland mobility. That the treatise carries an explicit injunction restricting its own circulation reveals the social logic governing the movement of knowledge along these routes: manuscripts traveled the same circuits as commodities\, with their restricted exchange encoding the value\, vulnerability\, and social stakes of the networks this presentation seeks to recover. 								\n				\n				\n				\n					About the Speaker				\n				\n				\n				\n									Dr. Joseba Estevez is a social anthropologist and Research Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HKU). His historical research reconstructs the commercial and manuscript circulation networks of the Southeast Asian Massif\, tracing the overland and riverine trade routes\, caravan economies\, and textual exchanges that connected Southwest China\, northern Laos\, Burma\, Vietnam\, and Thailand across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This work draws on colonial survey reports\, indigenous oral traditions\, and a corpus of Lanten Yao manuscripts written in Classical Chinese script — among the richest surviving textual records produced by any highland society in the region. Over more than a decade of fieldwork in Luang Namtha Province\, northern Laos\, Estevez worked directly with Lanten Yao (Mun) communities whose Daoist ritual specialists preserved and transmitted texts along the same caravan routes that carried silver\, opium\, cotton\, and horses across the borderlands. His research on Lanten Yao ritual expertise earned the 2024 Frobenius Research Award\, the premier honor for anthropological scholarship in the German-speaking world. He leads the YAO DAO Project at HKU and has directed major archival initiatives — including the Digital Library of the Lanten Textual Heritage (British Library\, 2015–2021; Heidelberg 2023; Leiden 2027) — mapping Daoist manuscript exchange networks across the nineteenth-century Southeast Asian Massif. 								\n				\n				\n				\n					About the Interdisciplinary Research Seminar 				\n				\n				\n				\n									This series aims to introduce a wide range of cutting-edge research in various disciplines and areas. If you have any questions about this seminar or would be interested in giving a talk\, please contact Professor Chun Fung Tong (tong.chunfung@hku.hk).
URL:https://ihss.hku.hk/events/religion-secularism-and-love-as-a-political-discourse-in-modern-china/
LOCATION:201\, May Hall\, The University of Hong Kong\, or Via Zoom
CATEGORIES:Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ihss.hku.hk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/image-28.jpeg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20251113T053000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20251113T190000
DTSTAMP:20261028T090658
CREATED:20260228T102936Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260416T102955Z
UID:97957-1763011800-1763060400@ihss.hku.hk
SUMMARY:Fostering Sustainable Growth and Family Unity: A Fireside Chat with Mr Mahesh Harilela
DESCRIPTION:Table of Contents			\n										\n				\n					\n				\n			\n							\n		\n						\n				\n				\n		\n				\n				\n					Abstract				\n				\n				\n				\n									The highlands of the Southeast Asian Massif and adjacent Southwest China constitute one of the most persistent geographies of ignorance in the human sciences — quartered between competing area studies disciplines\, divided by postcolonial sovereign borders\, and silenced by archives that encode colonial and dynastic optics while systematically excluding highland perspectives. This presentation takes the measure of that gap for the Upper Mekong borderlands during the period 1890–1910\, a moment when British and French imperial rivalry over access to Yunnan’s markets sent successive survey missions through terrain already structured by centuries of indigenous commerce. Drawing on the diaries and survey reports of French and British explorers alongside Yao oral traditions and written records\, the presentation reconstructs overland and riverine trade networks\, identifies key commercial hubs\, and maps the active circulation of peoples and commodities across the borderlands converging on Luang Namtha\, North Laos — a regional node whose historical significance has been largely invisible in the existing literature. Colonial and indigenous sources are read as complementary archives: the former documenting the infrastructure of movement from the outside; the latter testifying to its social and textual life from within. Two contributions anchor the argument. The first is a new cartographic reconstruction of trade routes\, hubs\, and commodity flows — mules\, silver\, opium\, cotton\, salt\, and compressed tea — that surfaces a borderland the Yunnan Myth rendered invisible. The second is a previously untranslated Lanten Yao treatise on equine maladies and remedies (1846 or 1906) that ended its journey in Luang Namtha\, testifying materially to a moment when horses were indispensable to highland mobility. That the treatise carries an explicit injunction restricting its own circulation reveals the social logic governing the movement of knowledge along these routes: manuscripts traveled the same circuits as commodities\, with their restricted exchange encoding the value\, vulnerability\, and social stakes of the networks this presentation seeks to recover. 								\n				\n				\n				\n					About the Speaker				\n				\n				\n				\n									Dr. Joseba Estevez is a social anthropologist and Research Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HKU). His historical research reconstructs the commercial and manuscript circulation networks of the Southeast Asian Massif\, tracing the overland and riverine trade routes\, caravan economies\, and textual exchanges that connected Southwest China\, northern Laos\, Burma\, Vietnam\, and Thailand across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This work draws on colonial survey reports\, indigenous oral traditions\, and a corpus of Lanten Yao manuscripts written in Classical Chinese script — among the richest surviving textual records produced by any highland society in the region. Over more than a decade of fieldwork in Luang Namtha Province\, northern Laos\, Estevez worked directly with Lanten Yao (Mun) communities whose Daoist ritual specialists preserved and transmitted texts along the same caravan routes that carried silver\, opium\, cotton\, and horses across the borderlands. His research on Lanten Yao ritual expertise earned the 2024 Frobenius Research Award\, the premier honor for anthropological scholarship in the German-speaking world. He leads the YAO DAO Project at HKU and has directed major archival initiatives — including the Digital Library of the Lanten Textual Heritage (British Library\, 2015–2021; Heidelberg 2023; Leiden 2027) — mapping Daoist manuscript exchange networks across the nineteenth-century Southeast Asian Massif. 								\n				\n				\n				\n					About the Interdisciplinary Research Seminar 				\n				\n				\n				\n									This series aims to introduce a wide range of cutting-edge research in various disciplines and areas. If you have any questions about this seminar or would be interested in giving a talk\, please contact Professor Chun Fung Tong (tong.chunfung@hku.hk).
URL:https://ihss.hku.hk/events/fostering-sustainable-growth-and-family-unity-a-fireside-chat-with-mr-mahesh-harilela/
LOCATION:G01\, May Hall\, The University of Hong Kong
CATEGORIES:HKU Family Wealth Series
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ihss.hku.hk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/image-27.jpeg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20251113T160000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20251113T173000
DTSTAMP:20261028T090658
CREATED:20260228T102404Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260416T102839Z
UID:97952-1763049600-1763055000@ihss.hku.hk
SUMMARY:Spousal occupations in the twentieth-century Yangtze Valley
DESCRIPTION:Table of Contents			\n										\n				\n					\n				\n			\n							\n		\n						\n				\n				\n		\n				\n				\n					Abstract				\n				\n				\n				\n									The highlands of the Southeast Asian Massif and adjacent Southwest China constitute one of the most persistent geographies of ignorance in the human sciences — quartered between competing area studies disciplines\, divided by postcolonial sovereign borders\, and silenced by archives that encode colonial and dynastic optics while systematically excluding highland perspectives. This presentation takes the measure of that gap for the Upper Mekong borderlands during the period 1890–1910\, a moment when British and French imperial rivalry over access to Yunnan’s markets sent successive survey missions through terrain already structured by centuries of indigenous commerce. Drawing on the diaries and survey reports of French and British explorers alongside Yao oral traditions and written records\, the presentation reconstructs overland and riverine trade networks\, identifies key commercial hubs\, and maps the active circulation of peoples and commodities across the borderlands converging on Luang Namtha\, North Laos — a regional node whose historical significance has been largely invisible in the existing literature. Colonial and indigenous sources are read as complementary archives: the former documenting the infrastructure of movement from the outside; the latter testifying to its social and textual life from within. Two contributions anchor the argument. The first is a new cartographic reconstruction of trade routes\, hubs\, and commodity flows — mules\, silver\, opium\, cotton\, salt\, and compressed tea — that surfaces a borderland the Yunnan Myth rendered invisible. The second is a previously untranslated Lanten Yao treatise on equine maladies and remedies (1846 or 1906) that ended its journey in Luang Namtha\, testifying materially to a moment when horses were indispensable to highland mobility. That the treatise carries an explicit injunction restricting its own circulation reveals the social logic governing the movement of knowledge along these routes: manuscripts traveled the same circuits as commodities\, with their restricted exchange encoding the value\, vulnerability\, and social stakes of the networks this presentation seeks to recover. 								\n				\n				\n				\n					About the Speaker				\n				\n				\n				\n									Dr. Joseba Estevez is a social anthropologist and Research Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HKU). His historical research reconstructs the commercial and manuscript circulation networks of the Southeast Asian Massif\, tracing the overland and riverine trade routes\, caravan economies\, and textual exchanges that connected Southwest China\, northern Laos\, Burma\, Vietnam\, and Thailand across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This work draws on colonial survey reports\, indigenous oral traditions\, and a corpus of Lanten Yao manuscripts written in Classical Chinese script — among the richest surviving textual records produced by any highland society in the region. Over more than a decade of fieldwork in Luang Namtha Province\, northern Laos\, Estevez worked directly with Lanten Yao (Mun) communities whose Daoist ritual specialists preserved and transmitted texts along the same caravan routes that carried silver\, opium\, cotton\, and horses across the borderlands. His research on Lanten Yao ritual expertise earned the 2024 Frobenius Research Award\, the premier honor for anthropological scholarship in the German-speaking world. He leads the YAO DAO Project at HKU and has directed major archival initiatives — including the Digital Library of the Lanten Textual Heritage (British Library\, 2015–2021; Heidelberg 2023; Leiden 2027) — mapping Daoist manuscript exchange networks across the nineteenth-century Southeast Asian Massif. 								\n				\n				\n				\n					About the Interdisciplinary Research Seminar 				\n				\n				\n				\n									This series aims to introduce a wide range of cutting-edge research in various disciplines and areas. If you have any questions about this seminar or would be interested in giving a talk\, please contact Professor Chun Fung Tong (tong.chunfung@hku.hk).
URL:https://ihss.hku.hk/events/spousal-occupations-in-the-twentieth-century-yangtze-valley/
LOCATION:Via Zoom
CATEGORIES:Quantitative History,Quantitative History Webinar Series
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ihss.hku.hk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/image-25.jpeg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20251117T150000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20251117T170000
DTSTAMP:20261028T090658
CREATED:20260228T101506Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260416T102954Z
UID:97946-1763391600-1763398800@ihss.hku.hk
SUMMARY:How Daoism Became American: A Tale of Translation\, Conservation\, Immigration\, Appropriation and Impersonation
DESCRIPTION:Table of Contents			\n										\n				\n					\n				\n			\n							\n		\n						\n				\n				\n		\n				\n				\n					Abstract				\n				\n				\n				\n									The highlands of the Southeast Asian Massif and adjacent Southwest China constitute one of the most persistent geographies of ignorance in the human sciences — quartered between competing area studies disciplines\, divided by postcolonial sovereign borders\, and silenced by archives that encode colonial and dynastic optics while systematically excluding highland perspectives. This presentation takes the measure of that gap for the Upper Mekong borderlands during the period 1890–1910\, a moment when British and French imperial rivalry over access to Yunnan’s markets sent successive survey missions through terrain already structured by centuries of indigenous commerce. Drawing on the diaries and survey reports of French and British explorers alongside Yao oral traditions and written records\, the presentation reconstructs overland and riverine trade networks\, identifies key commercial hubs\, and maps the active circulation of peoples and commodities across the borderlands converging on Luang Namtha\, North Laos — a regional node whose historical significance has been largely invisible in the existing literature. Colonial and indigenous sources are read as complementary archives: the former documenting the infrastructure of movement from the outside; the latter testifying to its social and textual life from within. Two contributions anchor the argument. The first is a new cartographic reconstruction of trade routes\, hubs\, and commodity flows — mules\, silver\, opium\, cotton\, salt\, and compressed tea — that surfaces a borderland the Yunnan Myth rendered invisible. The second is a previously untranslated Lanten Yao treatise on equine maladies and remedies (1846 or 1906) that ended its journey in Luang Namtha\, testifying materially to a moment when horses were indispensable to highland mobility. That the treatise carries an explicit injunction restricting its own circulation reveals the social logic governing the movement of knowledge along these routes: manuscripts traveled the same circuits as commodities\, with their restricted exchange encoding the value\, vulnerability\, and social stakes of the networks this presentation seeks to recover. 								\n				\n				\n				\n					About the Speaker				\n				\n				\n				\n									Dr. Joseba Estevez is a social anthropologist and Research Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HKU). His historical research reconstructs the commercial and manuscript circulation networks of the Southeast Asian Massif\, tracing the overland and riverine trade routes\, caravan economies\, and textual exchanges that connected Southwest China\, northern Laos\, Burma\, Vietnam\, and Thailand across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This work draws on colonial survey reports\, indigenous oral traditions\, and a corpus of Lanten Yao manuscripts written in Classical Chinese script — among the richest surviving textual records produced by any highland society in the region. Over more than a decade of fieldwork in Luang Namtha Province\, northern Laos\, Estevez worked directly with Lanten Yao (Mun) communities whose Daoist ritual specialists preserved and transmitted texts along the same caravan routes that carried silver\, opium\, cotton\, and horses across the borderlands. His research on Lanten Yao ritual expertise earned the 2024 Frobenius Research Award\, the premier honor for anthropological scholarship in the German-speaking world. He leads the YAO DAO Project at HKU and has directed major archival initiatives — including the Digital Library of the Lanten Textual Heritage (British Library\, 2015–2021; Heidelberg 2023; Leiden 2027) — mapping Daoist manuscript exchange networks across the nineteenth-century Southeast Asian Massif. 								\n				\n				\n				\n					About the Interdisciplinary Research Seminar 				\n				\n				\n				\n									This series aims to introduce a wide range of cutting-edge research in various disciplines and areas. If you have any questions about this seminar or would be interested in giving a talk\, please contact Professor Chun Fung Tong (tong.chunfung@hku.hk).
URL:https://ihss.hku.hk/events/how-daoism-became-american-a-tale-of-translation-conservation-immigration-appropriation-and-impersonation/
LOCATION:201\, May Hall\, The University of Hong Kong\, or Via Zoom
CATEGORIES:ASIAR
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ihss.hku.hk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/image-24.jpeg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20251118T123000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20251118T133000
DTSTAMP:20261028T090658
CREATED:20260228T100513Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260416T102954Z
UID:97940-1763469000-1763472600@ihss.hku.hk
SUMMARY:Cooking the Barbarians\, Conquering the Forest: Lanten Yao Spiritual Warfare at the Margins of Chinese and Tai Polities
DESCRIPTION:Table of Contents			\n										\n				\n					\n				\n			\n							\n		\n						\n				\n				\n		\n				\n				\n					Abstract				\n				\n				\n				\n									The highlands of the Southeast Asian Massif and adjacent Southwest China constitute one of the most persistent geographies of ignorance in the human sciences — quartered between competing area studies disciplines\, divided by postcolonial sovereign borders\, and silenced by archives that encode colonial and dynastic optics while systematically excluding highland perspectives. This presentation takes the measure of that gap for the Upper Mekong borderlands during the period 1890–1910\, a moment when British and French imperial rivalry over access to Yunnan’s markets sent successive survey missions through terrain already structured by centuries of indigenous commerce. Drawing on the diaries and survey reports of French and British explorers alongside Yao oral traditions and written records\, the presentation reconstructs overland and riverine trade networks\, identifies key commercial hubs\, and maps the active circulation of peoples and commodities across the borderlands converging on Luang Namtha\, North Laos — a regional node whose historical significance has been largely invisible in the existing literature. Colonial and indigenous sources are read as complementary archives: the former documenting the infrastructure of movement from the outside; the latter testifying to its social and textual life from within. Two contributions anchor the argument. The first is a new cartographic reconstruction of trade routes\, hubs\, and commodity flows — mules\, silver\, opium\, cotton\, salt\, and compressed tea — that surfaces a borderland the Yunnan Myth rendered invisible. The second is a previously untranslated Lanten Yao treatise on equine maladies and remedies (1846 or 1906) that ended its journey in Luang Namtha\, testifying materially to a moment when horses were indispensable to highland mobility. That the treatise carries an explicit injunction restricting its own circulation reveals the social logic governing the movement of knowledge along these routes: manuscripts traveled the same circuits as commodities\, with their restricted exchange encoding the value\, vulnerability\, and social stakes of the networks this presentation seeks to recover. 								\n				\n				\n				\n					About the Speaker				\n				\n				\n				\n									Dr. Joseba Estevez is a social anthropologist and Research Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HKU). His historical research reconstructs the commercial and manuscript circulation networks of the Southeast Asian Massif\, tracing the overland and riverine trade routes\, caravan economies\, and textual exchanges that connected Southwest China\, northern Laos\, Burma\, Vietnam\, and Thailand across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This work draws on colonial survey reports\, indigenous oral traditions\, and a corpus of Lanten Yao manuscripts written in Classical Chinese script — among the richest surviving textual records produced by any highland society in the region. Over more than a decade of fieldwork in Luang Namtha Province\, northern Laos\, Estevez worked directly with Lanten Yao (Mun) communities whose Daoist ritual specialists preserved and transmitted texts along the same caravan routes that carried silver\, opium\, cotton\, and horses across the borderlands. His research on Lanten Yao ritual expertise earned the 2024 Frobenius Research Award\, the premier honor for anthropological scholarship in the German-speaking world. He leads the YAO DAO Project at HKU and has directed major archival initiatives — including the Digital Library of the Lanten Textual Heritage (British Library\, 2015–2021; Heidelberg 2023; Leiden 2027) — mapping Daoist manuscript exchange networks across the nineteenth-century Southeast Asian Massif. 								\n				\n				\n				\n					About the Interdisciplinary Research Seminar 				\n				\n				\n				\n									This series aims to introduce a wide range of cutting-edge research in various disciplines and areas. If you have any questions about this seminar or would be interested in giving a talk\, please contact Professor Chun Fung Tong (tong.chunfung@hku.hk).
URL:https://ihss.hku.hk/events/cooking-the-barbarians-conquering-the-forest-lanten-yao-spiritual-warfare-at-the-margins-of-chinese-and-tai-polities/
LOCATION:201\, May Hall\, The University of Hong Kong\, or Via Zoom
CATEGORIES:Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20251120T123000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20251120T140000
DTSTAMP:20261028T090658
CREATED:20260228T100008Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260416T102839Z
UID:97935-1763641800-1763647200@ihss.hku.hk
SUMMARY:Revisiting Mass Action Incidents in Late Qing China\, 1902-1911
DESCRIPTION:Table of Contents			\n										\n				\n					\n				\n			\n							\n		\n						\n				\n				\n		\n				\n				\n					Abstract				\n				\n				\n				\n									The highlands of the Southeast Asian Massif and adjacent Southwest China constitute one of the most persistent geographies of ignorance in the human sciences — quartered between competing area studies disciplines\, divided by postcolonial sovereign borders\, and silenced by archives that encode colonial and dynastic optics while systematically excluding highland perspectives. This presentation takes the measure of that gap for the Upper Mekong borderlands during the period 1890–1910\, a moment when British and French imperial rivalry over access to Yunnan’s markets sent successive survey missions through terrain already structured by centuries of indigenous commerce. Drawing on the diaries and survey reports of French and British explorers alongside Yao oral traditions and written records\, the presentation reconstructs overland and riverine trade networks\, identifies key commercial hubs\, and maps the active circulation of peoples and commodities across the borderlands converging on Luang Namtha\, North Laos — a regional node whose historical significance has been largely invisible in the existing literature. Colonial and indigenous sources are read as complementary archives: the former documenting the infrastructure of movement from the outside; the latter testifying to its social and textual life from within. Two contributions anchor the argument. The first is a new cartographic reconstruction of trade routes\, hubs\, and commodity flows — mules\, silver\, opium\, cotton\, salt\, and compressed tea — that surfaces a borderland the Yunnan Myth rendered invisible. The second is a previously untranslated Lanten Yao treatise on equine maladies and remedies (1846 or 1906) that ended its journey in Luang Namtha\, testifying materially to a moment when horses were indispensable to highland mobility. That the treatise carries an explicit injunction restricting its own circulation reveals the social logic governing the movement of knowledge along these routes: manuscripts traveled the same circuits as commodities\, with their restricted exchange encoding the value\, vulnerability\, and social stakes of the networks this presentation seeks to recover. 								\n				\n				\n				\n					About the Speaker				\n				\n				\n				\n									Dr. Joseba Estevez is a social anthropologist and Research Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HKU). His historical research reconstructs the commercial and manuscript circulation networks of the Southeast Asian Massif\, tracing the overland and riverine trade routes\, caravan economies\, and textual exchanges that connected Southwest China\, northern Laos\, Burma\, Vietnam\, and Thailand across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This work draws on colonial survey reports\, indigenous oral traditions\, and a corpus of Lanten Yao manuscripts written in Classical Chinese script — among the richest surviving textual records produced by any highland society in the region. Over more than a decade of fieldwork in Luang Namtha Province\, northern Laos\, Estevez worked directly with Lanten Yao (Mun) communities whose Daoist ritual specialists preserved and transmitted texts along the same caravan routes that carried silver\, opium\, cotton\, and horses across the borderlands. His research on Lanten Yao ritual expertise earned the 2024 Frobenius Research Award\, the premier honor for anthropological scholarship in the German-speaking world. He leads the YAO DAO Project at HKU and has directed major archival initiatives — including the Digital Library of the Lanten Textual Heritage (British Library\, 2015–2021; Heidelberg 2023; Leiden 2027) — mapping Daoist manuscript exchange networks across the nineteenth-century Southeast Asian Massif. 								\n				\n				\n				\n					About the Interdisciplinary Research Seminar 				\n				\n				\n				\n									This series aims to introduce a wide range of cutting-edge research in various disciplines and areas. If you have any questions about this seminar or would be interested in giving a talk\, please contact Professor Chun Fung Tong (tong.chunfung@hku.hk).
URL:https://ihss.hku.hk/events/revisiting-mass-action-incidents-in-late-qing-china-1902-1911/
LOCATION:G01\, May Hall\, The University of Hong Kong
CATEGORIES:Quantitative History,Quantitative History Webinar Series
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20251125T123000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20251125T133000
DTSTAMP:20261028T090658
CREATED:20260228T095327Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260416T102954Z
UID:97929-1764073800-1764077400@ihss.hku.hk
SUMMARY:Survival of the Strongest: How Iron Technology Led to the Founding of the First Unified Chinese Empire in 221 BCE
DESCRIPTION:Table of Contents			\n										\n				\n					\n				\n			\n							\n		\n						\n				\n				\n		\n				\n				\n					Abstract				\n				\n				\n				\n									The highlands of the Southeast Asian Massif and adjacent Southwest China constitute one of the most persistent geographies of ignorance in the human sciences — quartered between competing area studies disciplines\, divided by postcolonial sovereign borders\, and silenced by archives that encode colonial and dynastic optics while systematically excluding highland perspectives. This presentation takes the measure of that gap for the Upper Mekong borderlands during the period 1890–1910\, a moment when British and French imperial rivalry over access to Yunnan’s markets sent successive survey missions through terrain already structured by centuries of indigenous commerce. Drawing on the diaries and survey reports of French and British explorers alongside Yao oral traditions and written records\, the presentation reconstructs overland and riverine trade networks\, identifies key commercial hubs\, and maps the active circulation of peoples and commodities across the borderlands converging on Luang Namtha\, North Laos — a regional node whose historical significance has been largely invisible in the existing literature. Colonial and indigenous sources are read as complementary archives: the former documenting the infrastructure of movement from the outside; the latter testifying to its social and textual life from within. Two contributions anchor the argument. The first is a new cartographic reconstruction of trade routes\, hubs\, and commodity flows — mules\, silver\, opium\, cotton\, salt\, and compressed tea — that surfaces a borderland the Yunnan Myth rendered invisible. The second is a previously untranslated Lanten Yao treatise on equine maladies and remedies (1846 or 1906) that ended its journey in Luang Namtha\, testifying materially to a moment when horses were indispensable to highland mobility. That the treatise carries an explicit injunction restricting its own circulation reveals the social logic governing the movement of knowledge along these routes: manuscripts traveled the same circuits as commodities\, with their restricted exchange encoding the value\, vulnerability\, and social stakes of the networks this presentation seeks to recover. 								\n				\n				\n				\n					About the Speaker				\n				\n				\n				\n									Dr. Joseba Estevez is a social anthropologist and Research Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HKU). His historical research reconstructs the commercial and manuscript circulation networks of the Southeast Asian Massif\, tracing the overland and riverine trade routes\, caravan economies\, and textual exchanges that connected Southwest China\, northern Laos\, Burma\, Vietnam\, and Thailand across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This work draws on colonial survey reports\, indigenous oral traditions\, and a corpus of Lanten Yao manuscripts written in Classical Chinese script — among the richest surviving textual records produced by any highland society in the region. Over more than a decade of fieldwork in Luang Namtha Province\, northern Laos\, Estevez worked directly with Lanten Yao (Mun) communities whose Daoist ritual specialists preserved and transmitted texts along the same caravan routes that carried silver\, opium\, cotton\, and horses across the borderlands. His research on Lanten Yao ritual expertise earned the 2024 Frobenius Research Award\, the premier honor for anthropological scholarship in the German-speaking world. He leads the YAO DAO Project at HKU and has directed major archival initiatives — including the Digital Library of the Lanten Textual Heritage (British Library\, 2015–2021; Heidelberg 2023; Leiden 2027) — mapping Daoist manuscript exchange networks across the nineteenth-century Southeast Asian Massif. 								\n				\n				\n				\n					About the Interdisciplinary Research Seminar 				\n				\n				\n				\n									This series aims to introduce a wide range of cutting-edge research in various disciplines and areas. If you have any questions about this seminar or would be interested in giving a talk\, please contact Professor Chun Fung Tong (tong.chunfung@hku.hk).
URL:https://ihss.hku.hk/events/survival-of-the-strongest-how-iron-technology-led-to-the-founding-of-the-first-unified-chinese-empire-in-221-bce/
LOCATION:201\, May Hall\, The University of Hong Kong\, or Via Zoom
CATEGORIES:Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series
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END:VCALENDAR