Speaker: Dr. Brian Lander, Research Scholar, ISAW
ISAW presents this lecture on Tuesday, October 14th 2025 from 5:30pm to 7pm in the ISAW Lecture Hall. Register for the Event: (Link Here)
Abstract:
“Since the twelfth century CE, the Yangtze delta has been among the world’s most prosperous places, a region that defined high culture across East Asia. This would have seemed a highly implausible future to most people in the Han empire (c. 200 BCE-200 CE) who tended to see the region as a miasmic swamp inhabited by tattooed barbarians. This talk will analyze how the Chu, Qin and Han empires conquered and colonized this region, gradually transforming it from a culturally alien frontier into a regular, if remote, part of the Han empire. The paucity of texts on this region’s early history reflects the disdain early China’s literate elites held towards it and makes archaeological evidence particularly important. I will argue that existing historiography on this region has been profoundly shaped by the lack of alternatives to the narratives written by officials of the Han central government. Because they rely so heavily on these sources, subsequent historians have tended to adopt a perspective of the imperial state and have rarely acknowledged the silence of the colonized, whose languages were eradicated by the Chinese empires. “