Rivers To Railways: The Evolution Of Manchuria Into Northeast China

Cyrus Chen, Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford's Center for East Asian Studies, gives a talk on the evolution of Manchuria into Northeast China.

How did “Manchuria” become “Northeast China”? In this talk, I utilize the diaries of local scholar and historian, Jin Yufu 金毓黻 (1887-1962), to explore how railroads brought Japanese scholars and their modern methods of archaeology into an encounter with local intellectuals from jinshi (bronze and stone) traditions of antiquarian collecting and epigraphic studies. In particular, I will highlight both Jin’s excavation trip with the Japanese Far Eastern Archaeological Society to the remote Bohai Shangjing ruins in Heilongjiang province, and his solo trip by train and bus to the vicinity of Ji’an on the Korean border to visit the Haotaiwang stele and underground tombs from the Kogury? period (37BC-668AD).