This panel explores new perspectives on race, ethnicity, and imaginations of the other in Chinese written cultures from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century, by probing into fiction, travelogues, chantefable narratives, and legal documents. How do fictional illustrations of Java as a barbaric land in sixteenth century China uncover imperialist foresights and political anxieties of the Ming empire? How do musings of Luzon reveal new geo-historical visions of Southeast Asia, and inverted deliberations on unorthodox womanhood? How does a nineteenth-century travelogue present a disconcerted gaze toward the British colonial power and heterogenous visions of racial others (e.g., the British, the Burmese)? How were late Qing Chinese legal systems (mis)conceived by Turkophone intellectuals? While contesting imperialist gazes, the panelists investigate how encountering racial otherness activates nascent insights, be it inverted gazes of selfhood, misrecognitions of the other, and/or uncanny experiences of becoming the gazed other.

Josh Stenberg’s presentation, “Vernacular Zheng He and Chinese Images of Southeast Asia,” examines Sanbao taijian xiyang ji (Vernacular Romance of Eunuch Sanbao’s Voyages on the Western Ocean), ca. 1598, a novel following the fictionalised the adventures of Zheng He on his travels. Among the places visited both in fiction and reality was Java, though the image purveyed by the author, Luo Maodeng, is deeply influenced by traditions of vernacular fiction and folk tales. The Javanese are frequently compared to animals, and are represented as an unruly and obstreperous people, ignorant of (Chinese) civilisation. Previous scholarship has argued that such depictions of Southeast Asians represent late Ming insecurity. At the same time, depictions of Southeast Asia in late imperial fiction must be situated in the historic development of Sinophone imagery. 20^th century leftist solidarity narratives had to overcome an existing idea of maritime Southeast Asia as strange and barbaric.

Rachel Junlei Zhang investigates gender, race, and imagination of the other in Qilin bao (The Qilin Leopard), an 1822 tanci fiction. War, conquest, and the first encounters between Chinese and European culture in the Qilin bao deserve special attention, since the story is set during the Wanli reign (1572–1620) after Spain had established its colony in Manila in 1571. Yet, Luzon in the Philippines is depicted as entirely Chinese. As this paper investigates the significance of how women were empowered and contained in the narrative through the author’s manipulation of many literary devices, not limited to cross-dressing, divine intervention, inaccuracy of geographical and historical information, as well as the art of magic, it explores new perspectives to understand the changing perception of womanhood in Chinese society and Luzon’s location and its people in Chinese ideas of the central kingdom versus barbarians, as well as in world geography.

Jie Guo’s presentation “Encountering the British in the Late Qing Yunnan-Burma Borderlands” discusses the late Qing author Wang Zhi’s Haike ritan (A Seafarer’s Travelogue), which captures Wang’s 1871-1872 journey from Yunnan to Europe via Burma. Although on this trip he visited multiple countries, Wang’s account pays particular attention to the Yunnan-Burma borderlands. His obsession with the region, Guo argues, has to do with British expansionist ambitions, which Wang Zhi was able to witness in person during the journey. His anxiety over the threat posed by the British profoundly shaped his account. Not only did he describe at length British activities in the borderlands, but his concern also affected how he viewed the indigenous (e.g., the Kachins and the Burmese) as well as the Chinese. By discussing the multifaceted image of the (racial) other(s) in Wang Zhi’s travelogue, Guo explores the nascent border- and national consciousness in late Qing Sino-Burma borderlands.

Finally, Vincent Mu-chien Chen offers a study of cross-boundary mis/understandings of Chinese law by focusing on the case of Li kitabi in Late Qing Xinjiang. Around 1880, the Qing government published a Sino-Turkic bilingual edition of Clauses and Explanations (Shengyu shiliutiao fulüyijie, 1868) under the enigmatic Turkic title Li kitabi (“The li book”). This paper employs contemporary materials in Chinese, Chaghatay, Tatar, Arabic, Russian, and German to determine the precise meaning of li. Moreover, by examining the ways Turkophone writers used the word li, this paper argues that, without dismissing the plight of Turkophone Muslims living in the Qing Empire, these Muslim intellectuals grasped the general concept of Chinese law far better than what current scholarship admits. In other words, the paper also investigate the question of historians’ own gaze─i.e., the observer bias─when dealing with boundaries and the implications that follow.

The panel consists of four twelve-minute presentations, and twenty minutes’ Q&A.