Historiography/Theory

Want to AI proof your degree? Study History!

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Can AI do history?

Someone sent me a link to this paper “Can LLMs Act as Historians? Evaluating Historical Research Capabilities of LLMs via the Chinese Imperial Examination”  Gao et. al. are trying to get LLM’s to demonstrate high order skills in historical reasoning, using a new benchmark ProHist-Bench. They determine, that no, they can’t. LLM’s still hallucinate, and more importantly, they answer questions wrong. My problem is not that they get questions wrong, but that the people doing this don’t seem to know what doing history is.

I suppose that part of the problem is defining what “doing history” actually is. AI can make music, if you define music as orderly sounds coming out of a box. If you define music as a form of art created by people, then obviously it can’t. What is doing history? Gao et. al. set their tasks as answering questions (some “easy” and some “hard”) about the exam system in Imperial China and writing exam essays in the proper baguwen 八股文 style.

Asking the AI to write a baguwen essay is actually kind of interesting. On the one hand, it is absolutely not the type of thing a real historian would want to do. On the other hand, it does seem like something an AI could do. More importantly, the civil service exam essay is a good example of what a “school” question is. The purpose of the civil service exams in Late Imperial China was to staff the bureaucracy with classically educated men who had demonstrated their literary skill and moral character through the exams, most notably through the 8-legged essay, which became the official format for exam essays in 1487.1 The exams also did other things, like create a common culture among those who took it, defining orthodox ideas, creating a class of exam “failures” looking for work etc.

The exams, and the baguwen in particular, were criticized by those who failed them in part because they did not work. Was this really the ideal way (or even an effective way) for men to prove that they had the knowledge of classical ideals and the moral character needed to serve the Son of Heaven in bringing order to the world? Was this not forcing the intellectual world in the direction of answering pointless questions in a poor format? This is actually a problem for any form of testing in education. You are trying to find something that is an efficient proxy for what you want. Answering multiple choice exam questions is not really a “task” that you will need to do in the REAL WORLD (as opposed to the unreal world of books and understanding in school) but if you can answer all those questions maybe you actually do understand whatever it is we want you to understand. Multiple choice questions are easy to grade, and it is easy to claim that the grading is objective (just like the baguwen). Exams work in the sense of providing quality control (they answered the multiple choice questions, they probably know something) and in the sense of encouraging students to study. The easiest way to be able to answer questions that make it seem like you have read and thought about Harrison’s Man Awakened from Dreams MIGHT be to read it and think about it.

Exams don’t work, however, if someone else takes the exam for you. This is why people cheated on the civil service exams, and this was why there was a whole industry of creating model exam essays so that people could give the impression of understanding without actually having to understand.

That is what AI does of course, and there are various ways to avoid that, just like the civil service exams tried to prevent both simple cheating and tried to come up with sets of questions and tasks that would select for the people they wanted. If you have students do an oral exam, or write the exam in class, then it is harder (but not impossible) to cheat, in the sense of giving the impression that you know something that you in fact do not. There are drawbacks to this, of course, such it being a lot more work for the faculty, and work that neither your bosses nor your students want you to do. Still, there is nothing really revolutionary about it. It is no different from downloading an essay from a cheating site, it’s just that now it is a curated, artisanal cheating essay that fits whatever prompt you were given. You can even get the AI to fix it in response you your commands.

But is answering exam questions really doing history, rather than an easily assessed proxy for it? The answer would seem to be “no”.

First, sources. Historians spend a lot of time thinking about sources. The authors give us a list of the things they have dumped into their LLM. If you look at the list they have a bunch of “ancient” things from the Qing (that may just be a translation error), which seem rather random to me (this is not my field). Then they have authoritative monographs and top-tier academic papers. These also seem pretty random. They are also all Chinese secondary sources, which probably skews them towards answering the very nuts and bolts sort of technical questions they are about to ask. The two English language sources are Elman’s A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (2000). Ok… and then Harrison’s The Man Awakened from Dreams (2005) Why ???? How are they looking for sources that will answer their questions, or adjusting their questions to what their sources can show? Got me there. There is really nothing here on the relationship between sources and interpretation, or even any understanding of what those things mean.

The questions themselves are also not great. Defining terms like “Zhujuan” 朱卷 (pg 30) or giving a short answer to “What were the characteristics of the imperial examination system in the Yuan Dynasty?” pg 27. These seem like tasks for an undergraduate exam written by a rather dull teacher, rather than a test for something with a brain the size of a planet. I think you could answer most of these with Willkinson. They are absolutely not something you could publish in a journal or put in your dissertation or your undergraduate honors thesis. I mention those things since those are the sort of goals you have for “doing history” when you get past the taking exams phase and get into actually doing history.

This is not really doing history. This is trying to get AI to answer exam questions. And failing. Why do that? I just don’t see how this is a first step into AI replacing real history.

I also looked at some of the other studies they cite, and they are not much better.  Hauser et.al. have created HiST-LLM) Their “benchmark shows that while LLMs possess some expert-level historical knowledge, there is considerable room for improvement.”

Here the only goal is answering multiple choice questions. There is a much larger “data set” but they seem to have very different things dumped into it with no idea what they are or what questions they could be used for. They are aware that

compiling such data poses several challenges. First, given the wide range of theoretical questions and approaches in history and archaeology, deciding which variables to record and whether they are best conceptualized as attributes [17] or events [18] and whether they  should be recorded as numerical or categorical already poses a challenge. Second, covering more than one or a few regions across different time periods is challenging since experts in history and archaeology specialize on particular regions and time periods. Therefore a comprehensive regional and temporal coverage requires engaging with multiple experts and academic resources. Third, most history and archaeology research focuses on recording well-established facts, but scarcely records that a vast amount of historical knowledge is inferred.

Again this does not seem connected to what historians actually do. History “focuses on recording well-established facts”? That is not even wrong.  The questions are bad, and the answers often wrong, in the sense that the AI sometimes gets it wrong and they sometimes grade it wrong.

Question:
During the time frame from 1568 CE to 1603 CE, was the characteristic ’Mutilation’, associated with the cults and rituals held by people of the ’Japan – Azuchi-Momoyama’ polity, present, inferred present, inferred absent, or absent?
Options:
A: Present, B: Inferred Present, C: Inferred Absent, D: Absent
Reasoning and evidence:
The high casualty rate of the Joseon and Ming forces, and the large number of ears collected during the campaign was enough to build a large mound near Hideyoshi’s Great Buddha, called the Mimizuka (“Mound of Ears”).
Answer:
A

Or

Question:
The characteristic ’Shields’ is categorized under ’Armor’. Was it present, inferred present, inferred absent, or absent for the polity called ’Latium – Bronze Age’, during the time frame from 1800 BCE to 900 BCE?
Options:
A: Present, B: Inferred Present, C: Inferred Absent, D: Absent
Reasoning and evidence:
Weapons, statuettes, and “double shields” found in male burials suspected to infer elite military or religious status.
Answer:
A

I think the first answer is wrong if they mean that “mutilation” was part of religious rituals in Azuchi-Momoyama based on the ear mound. The second one is, I think correct, but why is that a question worth asking and answering? If the goal of AI is to help students cheat on tests written by an AI, this may be of some use, but I can’t see any way that it can lead to doing history.  You can’t get the right answers if you ask the wrong questions.

  1. Elman Civil Examinations and Meritocracy p.57  ↩

Law/Posts/Qing/Teaching/Teaching selections

Fornication and the public sphere

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

So, if like me you are teaching some version of World History 2-Modern Boogalloo, you will probably want to talk about the early modern rise of the public sphere  and talk about how it creates a space (physical, like a coffee or teahouse or more abstractly like cheap prints in the vernacular) where a new public can talk about scandal, politics, ethics and buying insurance. You may also want to talk about how this is not just something happening in Europe. How to do this? Fornication!

I assume you will talk a bit about how the spread of popular literacy happened first in East Asia. If you wanted to give a good example of the spread of knowledge about official matters you could draw on Zhang Ting. Circulating the Code: Print Media and Legal Knowledge in Qing China.1 which has a lot on the growing ease of getting a hold of copies of the Qing code, which were was increasingly being privately printed.2

Zhang  also has plenty on the litigation handbooks that were being published in the Ming and after. Most notable is Thunder that Startles Heaven 驚天雷 , which went through many editions in the Qing. You can show them a page from it, and, if they are studying  Chinese, discuss how crummy some popular prints were.3

More importantly, thanks to Zhang Ting, you can talk about how the manuals popularized legal knowledge by, for example through question and answer sections and rhyming songs 歌訣 Here is an example that both explains Chinese law and ideas about behavior.

Fanjian zongkan ge  犯姦總括歌

Comprehensive Rhymed Song of [the laws relating to] Fornication

-Men and women committing fornication with consent, each shall be punished with eighty strokes of the heavy bamboo. Nannü hejian zhe, ge gai zhang bashi. 男女和姦者, 各該杖八十

-For a married woman committing fornication with consent, the punishment will be increased to ninety strokes of the heavy bamboo.

-For diaojian that seducing women to go outside [their home to fornicate], the punishment is one hundred strokes of the heavy bamboo.

-Rape tarnishes the woman’s reputation; the rapist shall be punished with strangulation.

-For attempted rape, the punishment shall be one hundred strokes of the heavy bamboo and exile to three thousand li.4

Besides getting them to memorize the song, you can talk about how this popularizes understandings of law. I suppose if this was a China class you could head off to talking about gender roles with Matthew Sommer5, or litigation experts with Melissa Macauley6

For a world history class it is maybe best to compare China to the mémoires judiciaires  in France and the growing public nature of litigation. Sarah Maza Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France.7 is the best source, and you can talk about the scandalous Affair of the Diamond Necklace Maza will help you talk about the content of the mémoires and what they show about popular ideas about justice. This is nice if your French is not up to reading them yourself. 

These are not really parallel cases, of course. The French stuff is studied in part because it leads into the de-legitimization of the French state. The Chinese stuff is not Causes Célèbres, although I suppose knowledge of the grubby nature of the law did not make the state look any better. Still, they are both cases of publicizing knowledge of what was once a state mater, and both cases where you can actually look at how popularizing knowledge led to a broader public knowledge of how the law works led to public opinion criticizing the state, with the yamen runners filling the role of Marie Antoinette. 

 

  1. University of Washington Press, 2020  ↩

  2. Zhang, Ting. Circulating the Code: Print Media and Legal Knowledge in Qing China. University of Washington Press, 2020 pg 42  ↩

  3. Image from Legalizing Space in China  ↩

  4. Zhang, Ting. Circulating the Code Pp121, 126-7  ↩

  5. Sommer, Matthew H. Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China. 1st edition. Stanford University Press, 2002.  ↩

  6. Macauley, Melissa. Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China. 1st edition. Stanford University Press, 1998.

     ↩

  7. University of California Press, 1993. ↩

Culture/Japan/Korea-Japan/Posts/Teaching/Teaching selections

Kings in All but Name

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If you are looking for a good new book to help you teach pre-Onin War Japan may I recommend Thomas Conlan’s Kings in All but Name: The Lost History of Ouchi Rule in Japan, 1350-1569?1

I should  perhaps mention that I don’t really teach this. The closest I come (now that we no longer have Rice Paddies ) is the bit before the three unifiers in my Early Modern Japan class. In the past I have done this with Mary Elizabeth Berry’s  The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto.2 and the two Eiko Ikegami books The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan.3 and Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture.4 Needless to say I don’t have the students read those, since they are too long and complex for this part of the class. I do have them read a bit of them and then steal a lot from all three of them. All of them work well  in that they make good points and have lots of cool examples you can draw on in class to engage their interest and make yourself look smart.

Conlan’s book is perfect for this. He is looking away from Kyoto, at the Ouchi of Yamagata who were involved in national politics but also local power struggles and international trade ( see, Japan is not so isolated.) They were good enough at it that there are a lot of records on them, and (this being Japan) a ton of secondary stuff. He has been working on this project since 1995, so he has gone through all of it and there is a ton of interesting stuff in here.

For that reason, it is not a very good book club book. Besides costing $120.00 in print and $109 on Kindle, it assumes you know a lot 5 about the history of the period and its politics and culture and cultural politics. There is surprisingly little fighting in this book about a family of warlords by a military historian. The various leaders of the family run together a bit, so the book does not really work as a “behind the music” rise and fall thing.  There is also maybe not quite enough on things like why patronizing shrines or writing poems on landscape paintings was important for undergrads to grasp these things on their own. On the other hand, if you can explain these things, and want cool examples, Conlan has you covered. If you want to talk about the importance of genealogy for elite clans and how flexible it could be, you can talk about the Ouchi’s supposed descent from the mythical Korean King Imseong (tying them to Korea ethnicity, kingship,  and trade) and how they transitioned to claiming descent from the North Star Myoken Great Bodhisattva.

If you want to explain the importance of foreign trade, you could point out that a single tribute ship could turn a profit of 1,800 kanmon. This would be the equivalent of the tax revenue of a province, or the price to buy a lucrative estate outright. One kanmon would buy you an ox, or half a horse.6 If you want to dig deeper, Conlan and his footnotes will help you explain the improvements in copper mining in Japan, and the role of the Ouchi in sending raw copper to the continent, bringing coins back, and establishing the value of coins.

Establishing the value of currency is something you would expect a sovereign to do, and the book has a lot on the Ouchi and their relationship with the Ashikaga shoguns and the capital more generally. The most spectacular is their attempt to steal the Ise shrines. These were burned in 1486-7, and since the Ashikaga could not afford to rebuild them, Ouchi Yoshioki brought the kami of the imperial line to Yamaguchi.7

There is actually quite a lot in here about religion, since connections with shrines/temples and monks were a key part of politics. This is often hard to explain to students. Since there is a lot in here about how the Ouchi “patronized” ….Buddhists and Shinto8. It is rather obviously tied to geography. This battle flag not only has the Ouchi mon, it lists the shines they are associated with, and thus the areas they are connected to.

Even better, if you like teaching with images, is this.

This is a copy of the Tripitaka, the Buddhist Canon that the Ouchi got from Korea, gifted to a Japanese temple, and then provided financial support for it to be recited twice a year both for the benefit of the listed patrons9 and for the benefit of the entire realm. Patronizing religion, foreign connections, usurping the role of the capital.. this book has it all.

 

 

  1. Oxford University Press, 2024. ↩

  2. University of California Press, 1997. ↩

  3. Harvard University Press, 1995  ↩

  4. Cambridge University Press, 2005. ↩

  5. Well, not a lot a lot. I understood it.  ↩

  6. pg. 251 I assume lots of people who teach this could come up with their own examples, but I found it useful.   ↩

  7. pg.374  ↩

  8. I will explain all that in a later class. Just relax.  ↩

  9. Ouchi and others  ↩

Aviation/Politics/Propaganda/Republican

Fun with graphics in Chinese history

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If you do Republican period Chinese history you know that the various versions of the Chinese state loved graphical representations of data. (This may be something they picked up from the Japanese, who seem to have done a lot of this as well.)

These are often, to my mind, weirdly hybrid things, since I am usually finding them in government reports and collections of statistics presumably aimed at other bureaucrats, but a lot of them seem aimed at jazzing things up for a general audience. Here are a couple examples from 空軍抗戰三周年紀念專冊 (The Air Force in the First Three Years of the War of Resistance)1

The first is pretty straightforward, the number of Japanese planes that bombed China (upper left), the number of bombs dropped, total dead and wounded and amount of property damage. Each category is split into three years (1937,38,39, see upper right) with lines to connect it all

This is fairly legible, in the sense that it does not take long to figure out what the image is trying to represent, especially since you can find this data in more traditional tables. This might work as a public-facing poster.

Some are harder to figure out, particularly in this book, which is pulling from a lot of other sources. So you can get things like this that show the number of Japanese POWs, (presumably flyers) divided by year and officers vs. enlisted. These are just those under the control of one unit, but what that unit is is not clear. The numbers don’t match up with earlier numbers of total POWs. Still it is a graphic representation of the declining number of POWs they were taking. So maybe trying to puzzle this out might be worth it. I have no idea how doing it graphically like this is supposed to make it easier to understand.

Then you get the fun ones. This is a table of large and small achievements, which are not defined anywhere. Is it worth digging out what these things are? Probably not, in the sense that it would be a lot of work for not much information you could use. I just like the creativity someone put into the graphics for the bars. I assume the far right big achievement is shooting down a plane? (12 in total). Only one traitor was caught, but I like the little eyeglasses graphic. I have no idea what 工作努力(literally it is diligent work) refers to, maybe good staff work? It is the largest category, 104 awards, and seems to be represented  by an impressive bar graph with a flag on it.2 Someone knows what really matters. 🙂

ss

  1. which I found here  ↩

  2. or maybe a windsock?  ↩

Geography/Japan/Social History/Teaching/Teaching selections

Teaching Japan with maps

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At some point in the future, you may find yourself having to explain a lot of Japanese history  n a big hurry in order to get to the class you are actually teaching.1 This is a really good book, and also really good if you want to do a lot of visual stuff.

Heian was of course the center of the Chinese-based state model that was established in Japan, and there are lots of pictures for this, but Stavros has a nice one that you can use to explain the orderly “Chinese” pattern that was being established. You can also explain how the Buddhist temples that rulers wanted to keep out located around the capital, along with the residences of the retired emperors.

Throughout he talks about the importance of inside and outside, keeping the major temples and the warriors out of the capital. This never worked well, but but you can see signs of in in this map, which shows how the residences of Ashikaga generals were kept on the outskirts.

He actually has quite a bit on how the shogun respected the rights of the court far longer than you might expect, from Kamakura bans on horsemanship and archery practice on the site of the old imperial palace (pg. 88) to Ashikaga deference to court ideals and spatial patterns. (Chapter 5)

The long decline of the Chinese based system led to the city shifting to the east, with the elite area of Kamigyo in the north, and the more commercial and common area of Shimogyo in the south.

This newly commercialized city was concentrated in the South, which is where the sake brewers and oil sellers were concentrated, as well as the neighborhoods with enough corporate identity to do a float for the Gion Festival.

Here is a somewhat more detailed commerce map, along with a map of the brewer-lenders and their shrine affiliations

from Suzanne Gay.2 If you want to get into the weeds of urban commerce and money lending she is your scholar.

If you want to explain how the wards changed as they went from bureaucratically defined areas to commercial streets, Stavros has both an explanation and a diagram.

 

Of course you will probably want some quotes on the destruction of the Onin War, and Stavros has you covered.

Holding aged parents in their arms, pulling along wives and children behind them, the townspeople fled the city in a roar of cries. And none was left to fight the blaze. The fires burned over one hundred blocks, from Nijo in the south to Goryo in the north, from Odoneri in the west to Muromachi in the east. About 30,000 residences- of aristocrats, military men, great and small alike-went up in flames. Everything is now ruined.

Across our charred land, all human traces have been extinguished. For blocks on end, birds are the sole sign of life.

Like hornets’ nests, the sanctuaries of the eastern and western hills have all been burned and crushed.

The Capital of Flowers of myriad ages is now a lair of foxes and wolves.

It’s too bad that Night Attack on the Sanjo Palace is too early for this, but I suppose you could use it 🙂

Stavros has both a nice map of the walled districts of what was left of the post-Onin city

and illustrations of the walls and guardhouses

So if you want to run through a lot of Japanese history, and do it with images, this is a good book.

  1. I will be doing that this Spring for HIST 436 Early Modern Japan (1500-1800) )

    One way to do some of this is to focus on the city that becomes Kyoto, which not only mattered  a lot but was where almost all the sources come from. A really good source on this is Matthew Stavros Kyoto: An Urban History of Japan’s Premodern Capital. (Hawaii, 2016 ). ((You could follow this up with Alice Y. Tseng Modern Kyoto  ↩

  2. Gay, Suzanne Marie. The Money Lenders of Medieval Kyoto University of Hawaii Press, 2001. pg. 42, 60   ↩

Qing/Social History/Teaching

Passing the Exams-All in the Family edition

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There is a long history of talking about the Ladder of Success in Imperial China, and if the Chinese bureaucracy really was a Career Open to Talent. This was also one of the few topics where you had enough data to actually do some vaguely social science type stuff, which made it a very popular topic for a long time.

If you want a nice summary of a lot of this literature you can look at “Kin Networks and Exam Degree Attainment in 19th Century China: An Analysis Based on Tongnianchilu” by  Cameron Campbell, Qin XUE, Shengbin WEI Preprint available here 

They also answer the question. 🙂 Specifically, the question Ho Ping-ti asked a long time ago. How many exam passers were “new men”, from families that did not have a history of exam passing?

With modern methods you can get better data. The authors tell us that the Tongnian Chilu (同年齒錄) and Mingjing Tongpu (明經通譜). contain self-reported information for 950,927 relatives of 34,313 19th century degree holders.

If you1 code in all the data you can get pretty good statistics on how many exam passers had relatives who passed the exams. Ready? Here it is.

As you can see, the Jinshi (which was the degree you really needed to get a job and have a career at this point) group reported only 28.4 % without any kin with degrees2 This is less than the 32.9% who had 10 or more relatives with degrees.(It is not clear to me if they count relatives who had purchased a degree, although given that the data is self-reported I would guess that they are all treated the same. )

The Juren (who might get a job) and Gongsheng (future schoolteachers) report radically different numbers. So this seems a pretty clear set of evidence that the lower ranks of exam passers had men from “lower” families, but at the top those with ink in their veins predominated.

Now just add some stuff on buying degrees, and you are all set to teach about this.

https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/s2u3w_v1

 

 

  1. Or the people you hire with grant money  ↩

  2. The article talks about how they define kin and how the lower degree winners reported fewer kin in general, perhaps skewing the results  ↩

Colonial Taiwan/Imperialism/Teaching

The 1895 Taiwan Republic and dodgy images

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If you want to teach about the rapid spread of “modern” ideas in China after the Sino-Japanese war, the 1895 Taiwan Republic is good to talk about. Basically, when Taiwan was supposed to be handed over to the Japanese under the terms of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, there were attempts to create a Republic on Taiwan. 1 There was at least some rhetoric about modern ideas of popular sovereignty.  ” An official seal has been cut, …it will be publicly presented with all respect by the notables and people of the whole of Formosa”2 although they also did not deny Chinese sovereignty. They issued postage stamps!

“

There was a picture of them in Dianshizhai huabao

The images that really interest me are below, however

These are apparently both in the collection of the British Museum, but without any attribution. The first has a red stamp in the lower right that suggests it may have been from the Hong Kong Ribao. Both claim to have been done by someone called Wu Wenyi, but I can’t find anything on him. The second one is particularly interesting, since Liu Yongfu (who led the Black Flags in the Sino-French war) is in it. He was actually there, and it makes a nice way to bring in the role of the Black Flags/Triads/Gowned Brothers in Chinese nationalism. There are also some aborigines. I don’t think there actually was any non-Han involvement in this, which makes me think the pictures might be later. (They certainly -look- at bit later) It would be interesting if they were already being that multi-ethnic in 1895. You could do a lot more with them in class with better attributions for the last two.

  1. There is not much scholarship on this. Lamley, Harry J.  “The 1895 Taiwan Republic: A Significant Episode in Modern Chinese History”. The Journal of Asian Studies. (August 1968). 27 (4): 739–762 is the only academic treatment I have found. Niki Alsford Transitions to Modernity in Taiwan The Spirit of 1895 and the Cession of Formosa to Japan Routledge 2017 looks at attempts to get the British to take over the island, although I have not seen it  ↩

  2. Davidson, James W. (1903). The Island of Formosa, Past and Present : history, people, resources, and commercial prospects : tea, camphor, sugar, gold, coal, sulphur, economical plants, and other productions. London and New York: Macmillan & co, pp. 279–80 via wikipedia  ↩

Posts/Qing

Qing state capacity

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The Qing was quite the Early Modern state, with considerable ability to do things and collect information about how well it was doing. The disastrously expensive campaigns to put down the White Lotus Rebellions 1794-1804 are usually cited as the turning point where the Qing’s ability to both make China legible and control what was going on began to decline rapidly.

If you have to teach about this, and need a couple of good quotes about the problems the Qing had with understanding what was going on, controlling its own subordinates and paying for it all, then   Dai Yingcong and Wang Wensheng have you covered.

Raising militias was always problematic for Chinese states, and Dai has a good quote about this from a memorial sent to the Qianlong emperor.

When local officials hastily recruited [militiamen], believing the more the merrier, they let numerous homeless drifters, elderly, and youngsters fill the ranks. In addition, the sectarian bandits have developed extensive networks by teaching [their religion] from one place to another, which are difficult to detect. Therefore, it is impossible to ensure that there are no people in the militias who are wavering and to distinguish the good from the bad ones, as the latter may disguise themselves. . . . Even innocent villagers have gotten used to killing months after having taken up spears and bows and abandoned their own professions, and take pleasure in receiving stipends and food rations. Their superiors can award and encourage them but cannot discipline them. [I am] afraid that they may cause more trouble after the campaign ends if they are not resettled properly at the slightest negligence.

Qianlong replies :

“Mingliang’s opinions are right. But now we’re relying on the militias to put down the bandits. If we revealed a hint of our doubt of them, they would be suspicious and fearful, which would be serious. . . . Let’s try to deal with [the militias] when we win the campaign completely.”1

Once recruited they were expensive and hard to control, as the Jiaqing emperor pointed out.

“Once joining the state army, the have to obey detailed military rules. While as鄉勇 xiangyong, they are free to come and go. Moreover, they are often better paid than rank and file soldiers.”2

They were indeed quite expensive, getting 2-3 taels a month where regular soldier got only one.

Here is a nice graph from Dai Yingcong (pg. 375) showing the decline of Qing silver reserves.

Jiaqing was aware of the crazy expenses for militias “rewards” for good soldiers, food etc. but

“As long as the rebellion is put down in a speedy manner, I can grant these dubious requests for funds and resources. All in all, it is better to to spend more to wrap up this campaign quickly than to cut costly outlays and risk dragging it on too long”…most “military spending has been dispersed in the society, so there is no need to worry too much about it”3

So the courts ability to control its people and even to control its own military was declining. The emperors were aware of this, but willing to let things ride.
There is obviously a lot more in these two books, but if you (or I) are looking for a couple good quotes to explain the problem and the reaction….here they are.

 

  1. Dai, Yingcong. The White Lotus War: Rebellion and Suppression in Late Imperial China. 1st edition. University of Washington Press, 2019. pg 344 ↩

  2. Wang, Wensheng. White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire. Harvard Univ Pr, 2014. p 142 ↩

  3. Wang, Wensheng. White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire. Harvard Univ Pr, 2014. p 144  ↩

Japan/Japanese

Oh thank heaven

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

So apparently 7-11s are becoming a tourist stop in Japan. This actually makes perfect sense to me. I have not done any time in Japan, but I have spent a lot of time in 7-11 and other convenience stores in Taiwan and Mainland (Lawsons). There are lots of jokes about Americans who go somewhere and want to see McDonalds, but a proper Asian 7-11 is quite different. Even back as far as my student days the ones in Taiwan were interesting. I think they were one of the first places that had a register that automatically had you pay sales tax, which mom and pop stores did not. You might think that paying taxes would not be a big draw, but the receipt also doubled as a lottery ticket, which you could not get at a mom and pop. The amount of semi-prepared food (and microwaves and stuff to heat it) just keeps growing and  you can do your banking, pick up a package, get train tickets and do a lot of other stuff there. If you think about it they are basically becoming like the old post office (the ones outside the U.S. with a bank inside and a place to check on the state of your pension and such), the local place where you can get in touch with the system. And grab a snickers and a beer while you are there.

This actually goes back a bit. I talked to a student a few years back who was going on one of those summer study tours to Japan. They had to do a research project of some sort to justify the credits, and they picked a study of the architecture and uses of Japanese convenience stores. The professor agreed that it was a good topic, but also pointed out that this student had the best spoken Japanese in the whole group, and was letting their distaste for talking to strange humans to push them into a topic that would mean they did not have to talk to anyone.

That, of course, is one of the attractions of places like this. If you want to get stuff done without talking to people, a proper convenience store works really well. Get your morning baozi from a proper place and you may have to talk to someone. Get them from 7-11 and they will not be as good, but you can avoid that annoying human contact.

Bonus pictures

H-mart convenience store in the Philippines

 

 

Hello Kitty 7-11 in Taiwan

 

AI and teaching

Teaching in the age of AI -Phantom readings

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

So, partially because other people are talking about it, and partly because I need to figure out how to deal with AI for next semester. Specifically, I am teaching HIST 295 Introduction to Historical Studies. This is the methods class where we teach Sophomore majors how to be historians. Also, since most of them will be teachers, I suppose they need to start thinking about teaching in the age of AI. I am also teaching 2 sections of an on-line asynchronous HIST 198 Explorations in Global History: The 20th Century World.1

So, for 198 I figured I would do a week on the Jazz age in Japan. I could have dug through a bunch of anthologies trying to find a short story for them to read. Instead, I asked Chat GPT.

Here is my question

What would be a good short story already available in translation to assign to a lower division college class on the topic of the jazz age in Japan?

A great short story to assign for a lower-division college class on the Jazz Age in Japan is:

“The Lady and the Beard” (髭のある令嬢, 1921) by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, available in translation in the collection Naomi and Other Stories, translated by Anthony H. Chambers.

Why it works:

  • Accessible and humorous: It’s light, satirical, and readable, perfect for undergraduates new to Japanese literature.

  • Captures the spirit of the era: It explores gender roles, Westernization, and modern urban life in Taishō Japan—key aspects of the Jazz Age.

  • Strong visual style: It presents vivid imagery of changing fashions, behaviors, and social expectations in 1920s Tokyo.

  • Tanizaki is canonical: Introducing students to a major author helps contextualize broader literary trends.

A nice set of bullet points that show “they” know what I am looking for. There is one problem, which led to a follow up question.2

Does this short story really exist?

Actually, my mistake—“The Lady and the Beard” isn’t a short story at all—it’s a 1931 silent film directed by Yasujiro Ozu, not a work of fiction in prose imdb.com+9windowsonworlds.com+9a2pcinema.com+9. I apologize for the confusion.

For something that does fit your criteria—a short story, in translation, centered on the Jazz Age in Japan—here are some strong and available alternatives:

📖 Recommended Short Stories on Jazz‑Age Japan

1. “Naomi” (ちじんの愛) by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō

  • Length: Novella (about 200 pages) with translated editions readily available (e.g. Anthony H. Chambers) windowsonworlds.com+2reddit.com+2reddit.com+2en.wikipedia.org

  • Why it works: Centers on a Westernized modern girl, the clash of traditional and modern values, and urban life in the 1920s—perfect for exploring Jazz Age themes.

2. “The Reed Cutter” (芦刈) by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō

3. “Gold and Silver” (金と銀) by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō

To some extent this worked for me, in that a quick web search showed that the Ozu film is on You Tube, so I guess I could assign that. On the other hand, they are making stuff up, and also don’t know what a short story is and are really not digging very deep. A brain the size of a planet, and you come up with “Assign Tanizaki”?

  1. I also have an upper division Modern China  ↩

  2. An alternate suggestion was “The Surgery Room” (手術室, 1895) by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke  ↩

Posts

Change Happens

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 2 Comments

Just got word from our fearless leaders, our outgoing president and less-than-a-year-here provost, that the Kansas legislature’s ban on DEI initiatives, mandates, training, and “gender identifying pronouns or gender ideology…on state employee’s email accounts and any other form of communication” probably includes our LMS (Canvas). Which means that my student information form is probably also illegal.

This is as good a time as any to say that this will be my last semester at Pitt State, our last spring in Kansas. As I said to my union, ‘retirement’ may be too strong a word; we are relocating and I can’t do my job remotely (they tell me), so I’m done here: https://dresnerworld.edublogs.org/2025/05/14/change-happens/

Just in time, I guess. Kansas already banned gender-affirming care for minors, banned trans folk from public restrooms that match their gender identity (though no enforcement mechanism); things can only get worse. The legislature has already mandated the form, and some of the courses, of the general education standard at all public universities; the legislature considered eliminating tenure protections this session; I can only imagine that it’s a matter of time before other content-based restrictions and mandates are imposed.

I don’t know what that means in terms of me as a blogger, especially here. I haven’t had much to say here, specifically, and most of my pedagogical innovation has been in the area of historiography rather than Asian history. I will make up my mind, perhaps, soon.

Literature/Pedagogy/Posts/Teaching

Teaching Cao Cao

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

This semester I am teaching HIST 332 Early China, which goes from Anyang to the Tang.1 One problem with this class is where and how to break it in half. The Shang, Zhou, and the Early Empire (Qin and Western Han) is part one. Then there is the Age of Disunion, Buddhism, the Tang, etc. Wang Mang is one place to split  but there is really not much on him. Cao Cao and Red Cliff seem better to me, and recently they have gotten a lot easier to teach.

The Three Kingdoms period is a great time to split the class, since while you can’t really trace much of later elite culture or popular culture or the social order back to Wang Mang you absolutely can trace it back to the Peach Garden Oath, Battle of Red Cliff, Cao Pi, the nine rank system and all that. Plus you can show them some opera and talk about video games.

This period has become a lot easier to teach, in part because most of Rafe De Crespigny’s insanely expensive translations and books (a lot of Brill) are available open source or on JSTOR. You can also use Tian Xiaofei’s The Halberd at Red Cliff: Jian’an and the Three Kingdoms, although this may be too much for them to read on their own. 2  or explained something they did not get. I got a nice mix of explained points interesting queries, and “I bounced off it answers”.   ))

The really helpful book is Cai Zong-qi  ed., How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context: Poetic Culture from Antiquity Through the Tang and in particular the chapter on the Three Caos, by Lian Xinda. Up to this point the class has been reading a lot of philosophy, some Sima Qian, and me bringing in some stuff from the new Zuozhuan translation to add some personality. Starting from Cao Cao and his sons we can do more poetry, and stuff written specifically to show you the personality of the author. This is a big transition, and it helps to go through some poems at this point. Here are two I will use

SONG ON ENDURING THE COLD -by Cao Cao

North we climb the Taihang mountains; the going’s hard on these steep heights! Sheep Gut Slope dips and doubles, enough to make the cartwheels crack.

Stark and stiff the forest trees, the voice of the north wind sad; crouching bears, black and brown, watch us pass;

tigers and leopards howl beside the trail. Few men live in these valleys and ravines where snow falls thick and blinding.

With a long sigh I stretch my neck; a distant campaign gives you much to think of. Why is my heart so downcast and sad?

All I want is to go back east, but waters are deep and bridges broken; halfway up, I stumble to a halt. Dazed and uncertain, I’ve lost the old road,

night bearing down but nowhere to shelter; on and on, each day farther, men and horses starving as one.

Shouldering packs, we snatch firewood as we go, chop ice to use in boiling our gruel

That song of the Eastern Hills is sad, a troubled tale that fills me with grief.

Also

FAMOUS CAPITAL – By Cao Zhi

A famous capital has many bewitching girls, From the Capital of Luo come many young men.
Their precious swords are worth a thousand in gold, Their clothes are beautiful and bright.
They fight cocks on the road to the eastern suburb.
They race their horses between tall catalpas. I have not galloped half through the course,
When I see two rabbits dash out before me. I grab my bow, draw out a whistling arrow,
And race in pursuit of them up Southern Mountain.
On the left I draw my bow, to the right I shoot;
A single arrow shoots through both rabbits.
Before the remaining feats are performed, I raise my hands and shoot right into a flying kite.
All the spectators say my skills are excellent,
The expert bowmen lavish praise upon me.
We return and feast at the Pingle Gate Tower,
The fine wine costs ten thousand a quarter gallon.
The minced carp and stewed shelled prawn,
Roast turtles and broiled bear paws.
I called out loud for my companions,
And we sit in a row, filling the long mat.
Then we dash back and forth, kicking a ball and tossing woodpegs, Quick and nimble we play, in ten thousand ways.
The white sun rushes to the southwest,
Time cannot be brought to a halt.  We go back to the city, scattering like clouds,
but come morning we will return again.”

So one poem about how much war sucks, and written from the perspective of someone who is actually there, rather than the more common literati lamenting the sufferings of peasant soldiers.  Then a poem that some have read as criticizing the frivolities of the capitol, but which I would read the other way.  The great thing about these is that the students can usually analyze them in class, and since you have read the Cai book you can explain them without being very good at this.

See also

The Jiankang Empire

Early Medieval China

  1.   I have a colleague who does Chinese archeology, so I can start at Anyang  ↩

  2. This worked better than expected. I gave them one chapter to read and then asked for a discussion post where they explained something they thought was important in the chapter (( “Circling the Tree Thrice: Lord, Vassal, Community”  ↩

AI and teaching/Teaching/Textbooks

Comparative textbookolgy

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

One assignment that worked well in this semester’s World History II midterm was having them write comparisons of textbook chapters. The prompt.

For this section I would like you to write a comparative essay looking at one of the chapters from Smith and a chapter from a different textbook.

In your essay I would like to explain what the main differences between the two chapters are. What differences do they have in what they are trying to show or prove about the period? Are there important differences in their periodization? Which one does a better job of explaining the main points of the period? Which one uses the best examples that grab your interest and help to make analytical points? Please be as clear and specific as you can. Your essay should be at least 6 pages (double spaced, so 1,500 words+) and include at least two citations. You do not have to do any outside research for this, but if you do, please cite your sources using Chicago style.

Our three books are

Smith, Bonnie G., Marc Van De Mieroop, Richard von Glahn, and Kris Lane. World in the Making: Volume Two since 1300. 2nd edition. Oxford University Press, 2022.
(hereafter Smith)

-Mark A. Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien, Societies and Cultures in World History: Single Volumes Edition Chapter 1-35, Single vol. edition (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1997). (hereafter Kishlansky)

-Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks et al., A History of World Societies, Combined Volume, Eleventh edition (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2017).
(hereafter Wiesner-Hanks)

Possible comparisons (All readings other than Smith are on D2L)

Smith 20 Expansion and Isolation in Asia
vs Kishlansky 23 States and Societies in East Asia
OR Wiesner-Hanks 21 Continuity and Change in East Asia ..etc

So, why did I do this, and why do I think it worked? Part of it is that traditional essays don’t work very well. Have them try to write an in-class synthetic essay drawing on the readings and their notes…does not work. And honestly, while I can complain about these kids nowadays, that is a really hard assignment for an intro class where they don’t have any background. Realistically, the -best- you could hope for would be some bits and pieces from the notes and  readings duct taped together. Having them do it out of class (the way I have preferred for years) nowadays just gets you a lot of Chat GPT stuff. Thinking more about it, doing it this way gives them a bit a structure. If you want them to do a large scale essay on their own you will most likely just get a jumble of facts and observations or some vague generalities or both. Having them compare chapters gives them two strictures, and the chapters should have generalities (but not vague ones) supported by organized facts and observations. 

So, why do I think this worked? Well, I got some fairly good essays, and also a lot of people who seem to have at least done the reading, even if they were not doing much comparative analysis, both of which I would consider a win. As a rule, it is hard to get our students to read anything unless there is an immediate, graded reason to do so, and making a close reading part of the exam works for this.1 It is easy for history to slip into one damn thing after another, especially if you are teaching something they have very little background in, and this did sometimes force them to think about how the two textbook authors were explaining things, periodizing things, and using examples and if this was the right way to do it.

I also did an anonymous survey about how well this worked afterwards. (22 responses out of 40-odd students). In general they were pretty positive about it. Only one who said they would never take another class with me if they could avoid it.  🙂 There were some complaints that this was too much writing. I actually put in a 6 page, two citation minimum for this (not normally how I do it) because I wanted to force them to go into the text and pull out specific examples to fill out the length, rather than just spinning out a vague one page comparison into three pages. This seems to have worked….some. Presumably I will try another version of this on the final and see how it goes.

It also helped me understand some of the problems with our textbook. There were a number of places where it was pretty clear to -me- why, for example, the textbook authors were lumping Russian expansion into Siberia and Central Asia with Asian empire building, but apparently it was not that clear to students. Likewise, the text did not actually say that China had an industrial revolution before Britain, although I can now sort of see how someone might get that out of how the book shoehorned the global context of the IR in there.

 

 

 

  1. Discussion posts sort of work for this, but not as well.  ↩

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