CCK-APC Visiting Scholar Lecture Series – Prof. Ronald Po: The Unnamed Cartographers and Maritime China in the Long Eighteenth Century
Abstract:
The interdependence between imperial China and the sea is intricate and multifaceted, a dynamic that can be explored through the lives of both renowned and obscure individuals. Their identities were shaped by the maritime world, which, in turn, was moulded by their presence and conceptualisations. In this lecture, I will focus on a group of anonymous cartographers from the long eighteenth century. Although their names have been lost to history, their engagements with maritime China should not be overlooked. These cartographers viewed the coastal region as a symbolic geographical space that required meticulous charting and surveying. The sea charts they compiled offer invaluable insights into the maritime dimensions of China during the long eighteenth century, a period when the Qing empire was shaping its strategy for governing the maritime frontier on its own terms.
Speaker:
Prof. Ronald Po is a historian of late imperial China from the fourteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Since completing his doctorate at Universität Heidelberg in 2013, he has taught in Germany, the United States, and Canada, and is currently an associate professor of the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of The Blue Frontier: Maritime Vision and Power in the Qing Empire, published by Cambridge University Press in 2018, and two books in Chinese, entitled The Placid Ocean: Qing China and the Asian Seas, and Turning the Tide: Historical Actors and Social Memories in Late Qing China, both of them published by China Times Publishing Co. in Taiwan. In 2019, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Date: 9 September 2024 (Monday)
Time: 4:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.: Tea reception
4:30 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.: Seminar
Venue: User Education Room, G/F, University Library, CUHK
Language: English
Online registration: Click here
Enquires: 3943 0406 /
