Creating local landscape: tidal bores and seawalls at haining (1720s-1830s)
type: CreativeWork
description: My dissertation explores landscape as a social and cultural instrument in the high Qing (1760s-1820s), a multi-ethnic empire with the largest territory and the most diverse ethnic groups in the history of China. In particular, I ask how a multiethnic empire rules and how the small county of Haining in east central China fit into the ruling house’s vision of its empire as a “great union.” Instead of answering these questions by examining the center of state politics (administration and state policies), I look at local politics. In this case I examine how seawalls, tidal phenomena, and scenes of daily life represented as Haining landscapes were collected and organized in local histories and imperially commissioned works. This dissertation thus seeks both to elucidate the historical relations between the imperial center and the locale and to address issues of wider concern to scholars of empire formation in the early modern world. Haining in the late imperial period was a small city located where the Qiantang River flows into China East Sea in Zhejiang province. Before the second half of the eighteenth century, Haining most commonly appeared in reports of local coastal floods caused by tidal bores and requests for famine relief. Following the construction of protective seawalls and the Qianlong emperor’s inspection tours to Haining in 1762, the image of tidal bores shifted. Once depicted as wild and uncontrolled natural disasters they now appeared as tamed and even aesthetically pleasing phenomena. Haining itself thereafter was celebrated in poems as a place holding a unique position as the destination for sightseeing related to the tidal bores and a booming cultural center noted for poets, bibliophiles, and scholars. The central thematic concern of my dissertation is the local response of Haining’s literati to the Qianlong emperor’s representations of Haning’s local landscapes. I analyze this response in terms of discursive representations functioning as political tec…
abstract: My dissertation explores landscape as a social and cultural instrument in the high Qing (1760s-1820s), a multi-ethnic empire with the largest territory and the most diverse ethnic groups in the history of China. In particular, I ask how a multiethnic empire rules and how the small county of Haining in east central China fit into the ruling house’s vision of its empire as a “great union.” Instead of answering these questions by examining the center of state politics (administration and state policies), I look at local politics. In this case I examine how seawalls, tidal phenomena, and scenes of daily life represented as Haining landscapes were collected and organized in local histories and imperially commissioned works. This dissertation thus seeks both to elucidate the historical relations between the imperial center and the locale and to address issues of wider concern to scholars of empire formation in the early modern world. Haining in the late imperial period was a small city located where the Qiantang River flows into China East Sea in Zhejiang province. Before the second half of the eighteenth century, Haining most commonly appeared in reports of local coastal floods caused by tidal bores and requests for famine relief. Following the construction of protective seawalls and the Qianlong emperor’s inspection tours to Haining in 1762, the image of tidal bores shifted. Once depicted as wild and uncontrolled natural disasters they now appeared as tamed and even aesthetically pleasing phenomena. Haining itself thereafter was celebrated in poems as a place holding a unique position as the destination for sightseeing related to the tidal bores and a booming cultural center noted for poets, bibliophiles, and scholars. The central thematic concern of my dissertation is the local response of Haining’s literati to the Qianlong emperor’s representations of Haning’s local landscapes. I analyze this response in terms of discursive representations functioning as political tec…
author: Fang, Qin
language: en_US
keywords: Haining, Landscape, Locality, Qianlong, Qing Empire, Seawalls, History
date published: 2008-12
date modified: 2026-07-24T05:19:50Z
provider: University of Minnesota
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Minnesota