Monthly Archives: February 2019

6 March China Seminar: Leonard Blussé on the Chinese Annals of Batavia

The Chinese Annals of Batavia, the Kai Ba Lidai Shiji and Other Stories (1610-1795)
Leonard Blussé (Leiden University)
6 March 2019, 15.15—17.00 HUIZINGA 006

The manuscript collection of the Leiden University Library contains much interesting historical manuscript material about the Chinese presence in Southeast Asia. Koos Kuiper has published a very useful guide to these sources. Catalogue of Chinese and Sino-Western Manuscripts in the central Library of Leiden University (2005). Owing to the inclusion of the libraries of the KITLV and the Sinological Institute, two institutions which sadly enough were decapitated a few years ago, much interesting source material has been added but is waiting to be integrated in a new vastly expanded guide book. For those who are specifically interested in Chinese source materials about Chinese life on Java from the late eighteenth century until the early twentieth century the Kong Koan archives that were acquired in the 1990s are of course of prime interest. In between 2001 and 2017 all the Chinese language Gongan Bu 公案簿or Minutes of the Board Meeting of the Kong Koan have been published by a team of Leiden and Xiamen University in 16 volumes under the direction of Prof. Nie Dening 聂德宁, Dr. Wu Fengbin 吴凤斌 and myself 包乐史. These source materials constitute a treasure trove for historians working on the social and economic history of overseas Chinese communities.
In my talk I should like to focus on another very useful manuscript the so called Annals of Batavia 开吧历代史纪, a Chinese history of the Chinese community of Batavia (1609 – 1800) written by an anonymous author at the end of the eighteenth century. The Sinological Institute already had a copy of this manuscript but quite recently a slightly older and more original version was donated to the Friends of the Kong Koan Association which has given it on loan (or in the meantime may already have given it) to the University Library. Nie Dening and I have recently published with Brill Publishers The Chinese Annals of Batavia an annotated English edition of this history largely based on Chinese oral tradition and some Dutch written source material. In my talk I shall focus on the composition and the contents of this curious hybrid Chinese urban history and suggest who the author may have been.
Leonard Blussé, emeritus chair History of Asian-European relations, Leiden University; extraordinary professor at the Research Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Xiamen University. Some publications:
Een Zwitsers Leven in de Tropen, De lotgevallen van Elie Ripon in dienst van de VOC (1616-1626). Amsterdam: Bert Bakker 2016.
Visible Cities, Batavia, Canton and Nagasaki and the Coming of the Americans, Harvard UP, 2008.
Bitter Bonds, A Colonial Divorce Drama of the Seventeenth Century. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers. 2002.
Strange Company, Leiden: KITLV Press 1986.
https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/leonard-blusse-van-oud-alblas#tab-1

UPCOMING TALKS
27 March HUIZINGA 006 Ann Heirman Ghent University
10 April Vossius, Leiden University Library Hsueh-man Shen New York University
17 April HUIZINGA 006 Sanjukta Sunderason Leiden University
8 May HUIZINGA 006 Doug Berger Leiden University

CHILL (Chinese Linguistics in Leiden) Program Spring 2019

CHILL
Chinese Linguistics in Leiden

Program Spring 2019

All presentations Wednesdays 15:15-16:30 in PJ Veth 103, unless indicated otherwise

27 February: Chen Weiqiang (Huanan Normal University, Guangzhou):
“Tone Change in Cantonese”

13 March: Shi Menghui (Leiden University)
“Fine phonetic details in phonological typology: Uncommon onset and tone interaction in Chinese dialects”

Special visit and two lectures by Redouane Djamouri
(Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l’Asie orientale CRLAO, Paris)
—19 March 15:30-17:00 (different time! but same place) “Syntactic stability in Chinese: Evidence from early archaic documents”
—20 March 11:15-13:00 (different time! but same place) “Is Tangwang a Northwestern Chinese dialect that underwent a real VO to OV change?”

27 March: Cheng Hang (Leiden University)
“When settled, we need nothing more: Mandarin bare clauses as simple predicates”

10 April (most likely different room): Joanna Sio (Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic)
(title to be announced)

24 April: Yuan Dan (Huadong Normal University, Shanghai)
“The lenition of voiced initials of Middle Chinese in Maolin Wannan Wu Chinese. A discussion on the lenition of aspirated initials in Chinese dialects”

8 May: Xie Yuan (Utrecht University)
“How do Mandarin speaking children build bridges: a syntax-discourse interface study”

22 May: Fang Hongmei (University of Amsterdam)
“Sentence-final particles in Mandarin”

—There will be a small symposium on Chinese writing on May 20. Details to follow

—There are also four courses in Chinese linguistics in the Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics 2019 (22/7-2/8):
1. Diachronic Syntax of Chinese: From Late Archaic to Middle Chinese (Barbara Meisterernst/National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan)
2. Comparative Chinese syntax: the verbal domain (Rint Sybesma/Leiden)
3. Introduction to Cantonese (Joanna Sio/ Palacký University Olomouc)
4. The sociolinguistics of Sinophone communities: Historical and contemporary perspectives (Henning Klöter/Humboldt)
registration opens in February:
http://summerschool.universiteitleiden.nl/courses/summer-school-languages-and-linguistics-2018

China Seminar 13 Feb: Naomi Standen – Taking China out of Premodern Global History

Taking China out of Premodern Global History (Part 2)
By Naomi Standen (University of Birmingham)

13 February, 15:15-17:00 HUIZINGA 006

‘China’ is a problematical concept for the premodern period because the name unavoidably invokes the fixity of a modern nation-state that maps poorly onto the various and ever changing political formations of earlier centuries. Global history (in contrast to World History) may offer solutions for how to address the premodern era without reliance on anachronistic national frames. The concept of technologies, broadly understood, invites us to trace the use of practices and ideas regardless of political or ‘ethnic’ boundaries, which in turn necessitates reconfiguration of the region under consideration, in this case as Eastern Eurasia. This paper takes technologies of movement – specifically oceangoing ships active in the South China Seas – as cases through which to reframe our understanding of premodern Eastern Eurasia with interactions and relationships at the core of a non-sinocentric analysis.
Naomi Standen is the first non-Europeanist appointed as a Professor of Medieval History in the UK. Her research started from a fascination with the ground-level functioning of borderlands, especially in the Liao (907-1125), and from there has expanded in both time and space. She works with texts, with archaeologists and with medievalists studying all parts of the globe. Publications include Unbounded loyalty: frontier crossings in Liao China (Hawai’i, 2007), and The Global Middle Ages (ed. with Catherine Holmes, the Past and Present supplement for 2018). She is writing a global history of eastern Eurasia between the 7th and the 14th centuries.