Chinese history in geographical perspective / edited by Yongtao Du and Jeff Kyong-McClain.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : the contested terrain of a geographical entity / Yongtao Du and Jeff Kyong-McClain -- Early modern mapping at the Qing court : survey maps from the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong reign periods / Laura Hostetler -- Kangxi's auspicious empire : rhetorics of geographic integration in the early Qing / Stephen Whiteman -- De-civilizing Ming China's southern border : Vietnam as lost province or barbarian culture / Kathlene Baldanza -- The geography of dragon boat racing in late imperial China / Andrew Chittick -- Writing personalized local history during the late Ming and the Ming-Qing transition : the case of a Ming loyalist / Xiaoquan Raphael Zhang -- An ambush of tigers : a socio-ecological history of the Ming-Qing Fujian tiger menace / Luke Hambleton -- The new frontier : Zhuang xueben and Xikang province / Yajun Mo -- Native-place ties in transnational networks : overseas Chinese nationalism and Fujian's development, 1928-1941 / Huei-Ying Kuo -- A preliminary investigation of the urban morphology of towns of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau / Gregory Rohlf -- Spatial analysis and GIS modeling of regional religious systems in China : conceptualization and initial experiments / Jiang Wu, Daoqin Tong, and Karl Ryavec -- Epilogue : what is a geographical perspective on China's history? / Peter K. Bol.

The authors in this volume believe that long-term, profound, and sometimes tumultuous changes in the last five hundred years of the history of China have been no less geographical than social, political, or economic. From the dialectics of local-empire relations to the imperial state's persistent array of projects for absorbing and transforming ethnic regions on the margins of empire; from the tripling of imperial territories in the Qing to the disputes over the identity of the former 'outer zones' in the early Republican era; and from the universalistic imagination of 'all-under-heaven' to the fraught processes of re-drawing a new set of nation-state boundaries in the twentieth century, the study of the dynamics of geography, broadly conceived, promises to provide insight into the contested development of the geographical entity which we, today, call "China".