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DTSTART:20260101T000000
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260402T090000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260402T103000
DTSTAMP:20261026T185712
CREATED:20260330T021433Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260420T064949Z
UID:105928-1775120400-1775125800@ihss.hku.hk
SUMMARY:Blood and Iron: Political Fragmentation in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean
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/blood-and-iron-political-fragmentation-in-the-ancient-eastern-mediterranean/
LOCATION:Via Zoom
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ihss.hku.hk/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/image-81.jpeg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260409T173000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260409T190000
DTSTAMP:20261026T185712
CREATED:20260318T020940Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260901T013233Z
UID:103184-1775755800-1775761200@ihss.hku.hk
SUMMARY:Entrepreneurship and Leadership in the Finance Profession: A Fireside Chat
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/entrepreneurship-and-leadership-in-the-finance-profession-a-fireside-chat/
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/2026/03/image-38.jpeg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260410T090000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260410T100000
DTSTAMP:20261026T185712
CREATED:20260319T093945Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260420T102853Z
UID:104156-1775811600-1775815200@ihss.hku.hk
SUMMARY:Pioneers in a Distant Land: The Overseas Chinese Business Community in South America\, 1960-2000
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/pioneers-in-a-distant-land-the-overseas-chinese-business-community-in-south-america-1960-2000/
LOCATION:Via Zoom
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ihss.hku.hk/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/slide-07.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260413T130000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260413T170000
DTSTAMP:20261026T185712
CREATED:20260410T030427Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260420T101923Z
UID:106165-1776085200-1776099600@ihss.hku.hk
SUMMARY:Roundtable Workshop on ‘Fairbank in China Now: Contemporary Academic and Policy Legacies’
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/roundtable-workshop-on-fairbank-in-china-now-contemporary-academic-and-policy-legacies/
LOCATION:Room 4.36\, Run Run Shaw Tower\, Centennial Campus
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ihss.hku.hk/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/image-8-scaled.jpeg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260416T200000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260416T213000
DTSTAMP:20261026T185713
CREATED:20260409T022521Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260419T081402Z
UID:106114-1776369600-1776375000@ihss.hku.hk
SUMMARY:Who Let the Gods Out? Possession\, Cohabitation\, and the Anthropology of Religion
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/who-let-the-gods-out-possession-cohabitation-and-the-anthropology-of-religion/
LOCATION:Via Zoom
CATEGORIES:ASIAR
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ihss.hku.hk/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/image.jpeg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260420T000000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260420T000000
DTSTAMP:20261026T185713
CREATED:20260224T061652Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260522T042611Z
UID:97338-1776643200-1776643200@ihss.hku.hk
SUMMARY:China-Indonesia Relations: 2025 Year in Review and 2026 Outlook - Book Talk
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/china-indonesia-relations-2025-year-in-review-and-2026-outlook-book-talk/
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ihss.hku.hk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Rakhmat_1920x1080.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260421T123000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260421T133000
DTSTAMP:20261026T185713
CREATED:20260330T020924Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260419T081255Z
UID:105923-1776774600-1776778200@ihss.hku.hk
SUMMARY:Recasting the National Fengshui Master: Local Knowledge\, Textual Authority\, and Centralized Order in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644)
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/recasting-the-national-fengshui-master-local-knowledge-textual-authority-and-centralized-order-in-the-ming-dynasty-1368-1644/
LOCATION:201\, May Hall\, The University of Hong Kong\, or Via Zoom
CATEGORIES:Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260430T160000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260430T173000
DTSTAMP:20261026T185713
CREATED:20260422T031127Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260430T084937Z
UID:107012-1777564800-1777570200@ihss.hku.hk
SUMMARY:Innovation Networks in the Industrial Revolution
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/innovation-networks-in-the-industrial-revolution/
LOCATION:Via Zoom
CATEGORIES:Quantitative History,Quantitative History Webinar Series
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