Dr Lance Pursey, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Imagined ‘Chinatowns’ (hancheng 漢城) in Medieval Manchuria: A Critical Han Studies Approach to Liao Dynasty Populations and Settlements
Thursday 31 October 2024, 17:00 GMT
China Centre, Kin-ku Cheng Lecture Theatre
By establishing the ‘Hancheng’, or ‘Chinese city/town’, the first Liao emperor Abaoji (872–926CE) rose to power among the Kitan tribes through the use of captive Chinese labour. Later, the newly constructed Upper and Eastern Capitals both had districts called ‘Hancheng’. And yet beyond these two totemic accounts of ‘Hancheng’ in the early tenth century, the term does not appear again for the rest of the Liao period (907–1125). Given that these ‘Hancheng’ were not paradigmatic but specific and time-limited phenomenon, can we justifiably envision them as ‘Chinese’ towns? By splitting up the collocation and delving into the respective semantic histories of the terms ‘Han 漢’ and ‘Cheng 城’, one a purported ethnonym, the other a synecdoche of settlement, Dr Pursey reveals the contingency and elasticity of both ‘Han’ and ‘Cheng’ in medieval China, and re-evaluates the purported ethnic segregation between the Kitan and Han (i.e. Chinese) in the Liao.
Dr Lance Pursey starts a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) in late 2024 to 2025, joining the European Research Council project ‘The Wall: People and Ecology in Medieval Mongolia and China’. He has previously held postdoctoral research fellowships at the University of Birmingham (UK) and University of Aberdeen (UK) as part of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project ‘Understanding Cities in the Premodern History of Northeast China, c. 200–1200’; and at Waseda University (Japan) with a project funded by the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). He attained his PhD from the University of Birmingham in 2020, with his thesis: ‘The Necropolitan Elite of Northeast China in the Long Eleventh Century: A Social History of Liao Dynasty Epitaphs (907–1125)’, in which he collated epigraphic sources to identify patterns in epitaph production and correlate them to political events and broader social changes in the two centuries of Liao rule in Northeast Asia. He is currently investigating social stratification and population distributions in 10th to 12th century Northeast Asia, using a methodology that incorporates archaeological sources and fieldwork, close reading of textual sources, GIS and DH prosopography. His BA was in Chinese studies with Japanese at the University of Sheffield, and his MA was in Daoist Studies at Sichuan University in the PRC. His general research interests include: Kitan studies, Medieval Chinese religion, National Identities in Asian History, Japanese Sinology, Landscape Archaeology, Prosopography and Chinese Historiography.
