BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//IHSS - ECPv6.17.0//NONSGML v1.0//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH X-WR-CALNAME:IHSS X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://ihss.hku.hk X-WR-CALDESC:Events for IHSS REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H X-Robots-Tag:noindex X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:Asia/Hong_Kong BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0800 TZOFFSETTO:+0800 TZNAME:HKT DTSTART:20260101T000000 END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260505T123000 DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260505T133000 DTSTAMP:20261027T072124 CREATED:20260419T081020Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260419T081020Z UID:106658-1777984200-1777987800@ihss.hku.hk SUMMARY:Local Lore of a Sacred Landscape: The Daoist Tradition of Peach Blossom Spring 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/local-lore-of-a-sacred-landscape-the-daoist-tradition-of-peach-blossom-spring/ LOCATION:Lecture Hall\, G/F\, May Hall\, The University of Hong Kong\, or Via Zoom\, Hong Kong CATEGORIES:Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ihss.hku.hk/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/20260505_IRS_Mark-Meulenbeld_banner-1080.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260507T160000 DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260507T173000 DTSTAMP:20261027T072124 CREATED:20260430T085410Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260511T041619Z UID:107561-1778169600-1778175000@ihss.hku.hk SUMMARY:Transport and the Transmission of Plague across Settlements in Early Modern England 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/transport-and-the-transmission-of-plague-across-settlements-in-early-modern-england/ LOCATION:Via Zoom CATEGORIES:Quantitative History,Quantitative History Webinar Series ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ihss.hku.hk/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9997.jpeg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260514T160000 DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260514T173000 DTSTAMP:20261027T072124 CREATED:20260508T032045Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260513T075016Z UID:107651-1778774400-1778779800@ihss.hku.hk SUMMARY:Flora\, Cosmos\, Salvatio: Pre-modern Academic Institutions and the Spread of Ideas 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/flora-cosmos-salvatio-pre-modern-academic-institutions-and-the-spread-of-ideas/ LOCATION:Via Zoom CATEGORIES:Quantitative History,Quantitative History Webinar Series ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ihss.hku.hk/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Quantitative-History-Webinar-Series-21.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260515T090000 DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260515T100000 DTSTAMP:20261027T072124 CREATED:20260420T023417Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260520T051054Z UID:106907-1778835600-1778839200@ihss.hku.hk SUMMARY:Mule Carts in Beijing: Knowledge and Ignorance in Transportation Planning in the 1950s 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/mule-carts-in-beijing-knowledge-and-ignorance-in-transportation-planning-in-the-1950s/ LOCATION:Via Zoom CATEGORIES:Chinese Business History,Chinese Business History Webinar ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ihss.hku.hk/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/20260515_CBH_Yujie-Li_Banner-1080.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260528T100000 DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260528T110000 DTSTAMP:20261027T072124 CREATED:20260514T090018Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260601T065000Z UID:107950-1779962400-1779966000@ihss.hku.hk SUMMARY:How the Tang fed its frontiers: military farms and environmental constraints in the northwestern borderlands 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-the-tang-fed-its-frontiers-military-farms-and-environmental-constraints-in-the-northwestern-borderlands/ LOCATION:G01\, May Hall\, The University of Hong Kong CATEGORIES:IHSS,IHSS Seminar ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ihss.hku.hk/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260528_IHSS-Seminar_banner-1080.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260528T140000 DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260528T153000 DTSTAMP:20261027T072124 CREATED:20260526T071237Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260526T075127Z UID:108719-1779976800-1779982200@ihss.hku.hk SUMMARY:The Making of China and India in the 21st Century: Long-Run Human Capital Accumulation from 1900 to 2020 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/the-making-of-china-and-india-in-the-21st-century-long-run-human-capital-accumulation-from-1900-to-2020/ LOCATION:Lecture Hall\, G/F\, May Hall\, Hong Kong CATEGORIES:Quantitative History,Quantitative History Lecture Series ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ihss.hku.hk/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Quantitative-History-Webinar-Series-26.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260529T083000 DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20260530T180000 DTSTAMP:20261027T072124 CREATED:20260526T033146Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260604T065156Z UID:108722-1780043400-1780164000@ihss.hku.hk SUMMARY:第二屆 “早期中國發展及其長久影響”研討會 The Second “Early China Development and Its Long-Term Impact” Workshop 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/the-second-early-china-development-and-its-long-term-impact-workshop/ LOCATION:May Hall\, The University of Hong Kong CATEGORIES:Quantitative History,Quantitative History Workshops ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ihss.hku.hk/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0236.jpeg END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR