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Rhetoric and Resolution: Chinese Historians’ Evolving Assessments of Ethnic Conflict and Resolution across the Mongol Era

Sat, June 25, 8:30 to 10:20am, Shikokan (SK), Floor: 1F, 106

Abstract

On the face of it, the entirety of Chinggisid Mongol rule in East Asia might be viewed as a protracted ethnic conflict, with indigenous people of all descriptions ranged against an extractive Turko-Mongol ruling class. The very fact that the Yuanshi, compiled in the immediate aftermath of Mongol defeat, contains idealized liezhuan biographies of Mongol-era elites whose backgrounds span Eurasia suggests that the period cannot be viewed so simply. These biographical narratives nonetheless portray a broad range of conflicts and tensions involving constituent elements of the Yuan polity, not least between local ‘Han’ and ‘Nan’ subjects and a northern and western ruling caste. The didactic nature of these biographies means that they transmit meditations on contemporary notions of the ideal and the transgressive as least as much as they fulfil their ostensible purpose of reporting events. As such, close comparative reading of these life histories across multiple stages in their telling can reveal a great deal about historians’ changing assessment of the causes and nature of, and recommended solutions for, such conflict. Interrogating the formulation of a sample of incidents from Yuanshi biographies this paper will compare their handling to related funerary and other inscription texts and the early fourteenth-century Mingchen shilüe of Su Tianjue (1294-1352). Focussing on variations in the location of agency and criteria for success, it will demonstrate the strongly rhetorical nature of these narratives, and their compilers’ varying prescriptions for social harmony.

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