Ke Zhang Fudan University Biography ZHANG Ke is an associate professor in the Department of History, and serves as assistant director of the Asia Research Center at Fudan University. He received his Ph.D. from Fudan University in 2009. His research interests include modern Chinese intellectual history, conceptual history and the global history of cultural exchange. He is the author of The Conceptual History of  ‘Humanism’ in Modern China (2015, in Chinese) and the co-editor of The Production of Knowledge and the Politics of Culture in Modern China (2014, in Chinese). He is currently working on a book project on the Sino-Indian cultural relations during the late Qing period. 「 The Changing Image of Martin Luther in Late Qing China 」 Among the famous personalities in European history, Martin Luther is a common figure who appears in the Chinese literature composed during the late Qing dynasty. However, there was a transformation of his image in China due to the role of Christian missionaries  and the reform movement in Qing China. Chinese intellectuals began to understand Martin Luther in more detail only after the Opium War, but until the 1890s his image among them was mostly negative as they thought Luther was responsible for the abruption of the Christian church. Meanwhile, the protestant missionaries praised Luther’s achievements in reforming the church and focused on shaping his image as an “reformer”. During the 1898 Reform Movement in Qing China, intellectuals such as Liang Qichao and Tan Sitong used Luther as a key historical figure, sought legitimacy for their reform movement, and repeatedly emphasized the significance of Luther to create a “myth”. The study of Luther’s mythological image is not only about exploring whether it is in line with the history of Christianity in Europe, but more importantly, about the actual purpose of these image creators and the specific Chinese historical

Kunbing Xiao NYU Shanghai and Fudan University Biography Kunbing Xiao is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Southwest Minzu University, Chengdu, Sichuan. She is the CGA-ARC postdoctoral for the 2017-2018 academic year. Kunbing Xiao’s research interests include historical anthropology, sensory anthropology, cultural heritage studies, and particularly the history of tea trade in modern China.Kunbing Xiao received her PhD degree in Ethnology and Anthropology Department from Xiamen University. Her doctoral dissertation is about the tea trade in northern Fujian province from 17th-19th centuries in the context of modern globalization. From 2014-2015, she was an ArgO-EMR research fellow affiliate to Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford, where she completed the research on the practice of Chinese tea in the cultivation of personhood and well-being. 「 The Transmission of Bohea: Chinese Black Tea in International Tea Trade (17th-19th Centuries) 」 Bohea, the Chinese tea originating from Wuyi Mountain, was the major tea product that China exported to Western countries from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. The pronunciation of Bohea comes from the southern Fujian dialect, rather than from its actual place of origin in northern Fujian nor from Mandarin. Restrictions on maritime trade were lifted by the Qing government in 1684, and this resulted in Xiamen becoming one of the four ports open to foreigners. It was the Western merchants who bought tea in Xiamen that drew from the local dialect the name of Bohea to refer in general to teas originating from Wuyi. Therefore, the term Bohea clearly embodies both the Eurasian connection and the role of the market that went into shaping it as a commercial product of historical significance within a world of transnational trade networks. The connotation of Bohea varied according to the specific context. Ever since the late  seventeenth century, Bohea had successively been known

Jerome Whitington New York University Biography Jerome Whitington (NYU, Anthropology) is an ecological anthropologist whose research broadly addresses how business knowledge practices prefigure climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies, specializing in mainland Southeast Asia. He is currently writing an ethnography titled Accounting for Atmosphere: Climate Change, Carbon Quantification, and the New Earth. His previous research concerns Sustainable energy development and water politics. His book Anthropogenic Rivers: The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower is forthcoming (2018) with Cornell University Press.  「 Thailand’s Model Event: Insurance, Industrialization and Climate-Related Flooding 」 Catastrophic flooding of the Bangkok floodplain in 2011 was the world’s fourth largest financial loss due to natural disaster and a major wake up call for industrial estates, reinsurance companies and supply chain managers. An anthropological approach to infrastructure and business knowledge concerning climate change foregrounds, on the one hand, how little “climate change” per se figured into corporate actors’ evaluation of future risk. Yet on the other hand, the flooding event served to dramatically rework understanding of water-related risk due to climate change in Southeast Asia. Even while reinsurance companies like Aon Benfield (the largest underwriter of flood insurance in Thailand at the time) or major industrial estate managers demurred from explicit reflection on climate risk, they nonetheless took decisive steps to model future risk avoidance strategies on their experience of the disaster. I explore the concept of the “model event” as an epistemic figure in which real world events are taken to model future possibilities deemed too complex for quantification and digital simulation. The crucial question that emerges is to what extent do model events enable actors to ask vital questions about localized future climate impacts and present-day possibilities for action? #NYUShanghai Facebook Twitter Instagram Weibo Youtube CONTACT US Email: cga@nyu.edu Phone Number: +86 (21) 20595032 WeChat: NYUShanghaiCGA Address: 1555 Century Avenue, Pudong New

Helen Wang The British Museum Biography Dr Helen Wang is Curator of East Asian Money at the British Museum. Her publications cover a wide range of subjects, and include Money on the Silk Road: the evidence from Eastern Central Asia to c. AD800 (2004), Textiles as Money on the Silk Road (2013), Chairman Mao Badges: Symbols and Slogans of the Cultural Revolution (2008), Catalogue of the Japanese Coin Collection (pre-Meiji) at the British Museum (2010). She has also produced several publications focussing on Sir Aurel Stein (1862-1943) and his collections in the UK and Hungary. Website: Chinese Money Matters http://chinesemoneymatters.wordpress.com 「 Western Interest in Chinese Money – The Beginnings of East Asian Numismatics 」 There are about 900,000 coins, banknotes, tokens and other money-related objects in the British Museum collections. The British Museum was founded in 1753, and at first the coins were housed with manuscripts (coins were considered as metal manuscripts), until a separate Department of Coins and Medals was created in 1860. Reginald Stuart Poole (1832-1895), Head of the Department between 1870 and 1893, had a vision of creating a scholarly series of British Museum catalogues of coins. He started with the coins of Europe, especially the Greek and Roman series, but also had a very strong interest in Asia, and was keen to develop Asian numismatics. While he was Head of the Department, the Asian coin collections expanded by the thousands, including the East Asian collections of Hosea Ballou Morse, Christopher Thomas Gardner, and Kutsuki Masatsuna. Poole himself supervised the compilation and publication of 16 British Museum Catalogues of Oriental (i.e. Islamic), Indian and Chinese coins. In this presentation, I will look at the history of the Asian coin collections at the British Museum, some of the key people involved, and their motivations. #NYUShanghai Facebook Twitter Instagram

Norman Underwood New York University Biography Norman Underwood is a recent PhD from UC Berkeley, where his research focused on the economics and human-capital needs of the early Christian Church in the late Roman Empire. His research on these topics has now moved towards the larger history of religious professionals in antiquity including ordained physicians, lawyers, and food workers. 「 Buying Silk and Frankincense in Late Roman Egypt 」 The late Roman economy has become a cause célèbre among Classical historians recently, as the collection and digitization of papyrus evidence from Roman Egypt has elucidated that a period typically labelled under “Decline and Fall” had a more robust monetized economy than the heyday of the so-called Pax Romana(ca. 31 BCE-235 CE). As a consequence of the new wealth and prosperous wage-labor economy of the late empire, Romans were very much willing to spend their new cash on luxury goods from India and China at a rate far beyond their predecessors. This paper will explore how the movement of acquired “Eastern” luxuries such as silk, pepper, and frankincense transitioned in the Roman imagination from exotic rarities to standard “bought” goods of fashionable consumption. Foreignness, in ways only very recently demonstrable, was how middling and elite Romans chose to display their cosmopolitan shared tastes with what they perceived as their analogues in the East. The paper will conclude on the ramifications of what it meant to purchase “Eastern” exotics in a Christianizing and rapidly changing social landscape that mandated the ostentatious purchase of goods from Serica (China) and India as a minimum for modish living. #NYUShanghai Facebook Twitter Instagram Weibo Youtube CONTACT US Email: cga@nyu.edu Phone Number: +86 (21) 20595032 WeChat: NYUShanghaiCGA Address: 1555 Century Avenue, Pudong New Area, Shanghai, China. © 2018 All Rights Reserved © 2018 All Rights Reserved ON THE SITE About Us People Events

Mark Swislocki New York University Abu Dhabi Biography Mark Swislocki is Associate Professor of History at NYU Abu Dhabi. His current research focuses on the environmental history of southwest China. His is the author of Culinary Nostalgia: Regional Food Culture and the Urban Experience in Shanghai (Stanford, 2009) and articles on food history, environmental history, and animal studies. 「 Scaling Zomia from the Shore: Anglo-American Learning about Yunnan from Canton in the Mid-Nineteenth Century 」 How did Anglo-Americans acquire knowledge about China’s interior without direct access?  This paper takes a new look at The Chinese Repository, which published news and knowledge about China from 1832-1851, focusing on its production of knowledge about Yunnan.  The province appears to have been of marginal interest until, prior to the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Burmese War, intense interest grew in its historical status as the location of Sino-Burmese wars in Ming and Qing times, as evident in historical Chinese records.  The paper compares the degree to which Anglo-American knowledge differed from that produced by other Europeans, including French Jesuits, and shaped understanding of the province for the rest of the 19th century. #NYUShanghai Facebook Twitter Instagram Weibo Youtube CONTACT US Email: cga@nyu.edu Phone Number: +86 (21) 20595032 WeChat: NYUShanghaiCGA Address: 1555 Century Avenue, Pudong New Area, Shanghai, China. © 2018 All Rights Reserved © 2018 All Rights Reserved ON THE SITE About Us People Events News Publications Research Projects Database #NYUShanghai Facebook Twitter Instagram Weibo Youtube MAIN LINKS New York Shanghai Abu Dhabi             CONTACT US       Email: cga@nyu.edu       Phone Number: +86 (21) 20595032       WeChat: NYUShanghaiCGA       Address: 1555 Century Avenue,       Pudong New Area, Shanghai, China.

Qing Sun Fudan University Biography Sun Qing is associate professor at the Department of History, Fudan University. She received her Ph.D degree in Chinese history from Fudan University. Her research interests include modern Chinese history, intellectual history, and the history of cross-cultural interactions. She has published a monograph in Chinese and dozens of articles in Chinese, English and Japanese. 「 To View the Magic Images from Lens (jingying): The Early Experiences about Magic Lantern as Urban Residents (1670-1921) 」 In the middle of the 17th century, an embryonic form of lantern slide was invented. This machine was called “magic lantern”. It was brought to China by Jesuit missionaries such as Ferdinand Verbiest and was part of overseas trade. The machine subsequently entered the palace and also used at some catholic churches, where it was considered as a kind of exotic optical toy. Since then, a variety of names have appeared in Chinese documents referring to this machine and the “wonder in dark room”. By the end of the 17th century and the early 18th century, optical workshops emerged at cities located in the lower Yangtze river delta, including in Suzhou and Nanjing. During the early 19th century, with the activities of medical missionaries, the “magic lantern” became the main teaching tool for western medicine, demonstrating anatomical images and photographs of the human body. This paper focuses on two aspects of the transmission of this “magic lantern”. First, it explores the different Chinese terms used to refer to the “magic lantern”. Second, it examines the multifaceted encounters between the Chinese people and the “magic lanterns” prior to 1927. It will argue that the Chinese experience with the “Magic lanterns” was not only that of a foreign commodity, but also as a material media that made meaningful changes to Chinese epistemology, the

Jia Si Fudan University Biography SI Jia received her Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania in 2006 and now is professor of history at Fudan University. Her research focuses on modern Chinese history and the history of Sino-Western cultural exchanges, and extends to the history of publishing, culture and reading. She is the author of Circulation of English in China: Speakers, Historical Texts, and a New Linguistic Landscape (2009) and Chinese-English Contact and Cultural Exchanges in Modern China (2016). She has published over 30 papers in influential journals, and is now working on a national-level research project on the Chinese works and manuscripts of early China protestant missionaries. She has been a visiting scholar of École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, France and Academia Sinica, Taiwan. She was Haney Foundation Fellow in 2001-2002. 「 Reflections on Chinese Civilization: Arnold J. Toynbee’s 1929 Journey to China 」 Arnold J. Toynbee’s (1889-1975) record of his 1929 journey to China might well be considered the most important expedition undertaken by the celebrated historian. In the work published as a result of the trip, A Journey to China (1931), Toynbee observes the complex cultural interaction taking place in Europe in the wake of the First World War. Though he only ever had one opportunity to visit mainland China during his lifetime, Toynbee’s seven-month stay in the Far East allowed him to ruminate on the globe’s variety of civilisations and theoretical approaches to universal history; thus laying the foundation for his most famous work, the 12-volume A Study of History (1934-1961). By translating Toynbee’s A Journey to China into Chinese for the first time, a number of points have become particularly apparent through a close reading of the book: 1) Toynbee’s views on the situation of the British treaty-ports in China (and their prospects). For

Kyoko Shinozaki University of Salzburg Biography Kyoko Shinozaki is currently Professor of Sociology with a focus on “Social Change and Mobilities” at the University of Salzburg. She has been looking at processes of contemporary international migration of both ‘less-skilled’ and ‘skilled’ flows from a transnational perspective. She is particularly interested in how migration processes reconstitute globally intersecting inequalities along the division of racialisation, class and gender. Her main areas of research include international labour migration and gender care and ageing and transnational skilled migration/mobilities from a comparative perspective between Europe and Asia. Her recent research examines the changing meaning of cultural capital across borders in the context of the ‘internationalisation’ of higher education institutions (HEIs), in particular the role of HEIs. She has participated in several international projects, including “Integration of female immigrants in labour market and society. Policy assessment and policy recommendations” (FP6) and “Migrant domestic workers and the ILO Convention 189: Organizing, rights and transnational solidarity” (JSPS). 「 Higher Education Institutions as Transnational Knowledge Brokers 」 Higher education institutions (HEIs) are increasingly becoming ‘magnets’ for a skilled migrant workforce. While ‘internationalisation’ is often understood as something to be celebrated and (further) accomplished, some observers speak of clear signs of discriminatory experiences among racialised and migrant academics. This is a new aspect, as social inequalities have by and large been considered in migration studies to be the sole terrain of labour mobility into less-skilled sectors of the economy. Meanwhile, abundant literature on gender and higher education shows that women academics have poorer access to career progression than men, demonstrating gender-based academic career inequalities. However, the insights generated in these two strands of scholarship have seldom been in conversation with one another. In addition, much attention has been paid to the experience of individual academics and students, leaving the role

Yunli Shi University of Science and Technology of China Biography Shi Yunli is Professor of the History of Science at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei. His research interests include the dissemination and reception of Arabic and European astronomy and astrology in China and Korea, on which he has published a series articles in both Chinese and English. His latest book, with Chu Longfei, in this field is on the most important work introducing European astronomy to late Ming and Early Qing China: Shi Yunli & Chu Longfei. Chongzhen Reign Treatises on Calendrical Astronomy Collectively Collated, Hefei: Press of the University of Science and Technology of China, 2017 (石云里, 褚龙飞. 崇祯历书合校. 合肥：中国科学技术大学出版社, 2017). 「 From Scientific Understanding to Cultural Fantasy: Chinese Image of Islamic Astronomy in the Ming and Qing Period 」 By the order of the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty Zhu Yuanzhang 朱元璋 (1328-1398), a set of Zij was compiled and translated into Chinese during the Hongwu Reign (1368-1398) under the Chinese title Huihui lifa 回回曆法 (Chinese-Islamic System of Calendrical Astronomy).  Previous studies have provided us with a good picture about how the Zij was adopted in parallel with the official Chinese system, the Datong li 大統曆 (Great Union System of Calendrical Astronomy), and applied in astronomical calculations by the Muslim astronomers serving at the imperial observatory of Ming dynasty. This paper will try to move a little bit further to show how the Zij was looked upon and understood by Chinese astronomers in the Ming and Qing period. In view that the Zij contained some astronomical techniques that the Chinese astronomy did not cover, Chinese astronomers in the period kept a high opinion on Islamic astronomy. When the Datong li was found inaccurate, some of them even attempted to understand the scientific

Anton Schweizer Kyushu University Biography Alan Crawford is a postdoctoral researcher at Shanghai Jiaotong University. Prior to arriving at STJU he taught at Bristol University in the UK, where he completed a PhD in history, and at NYU Shanghai as a Global Perspectives on Society teaching fellow. He is currently working on a book manuscript on Russian concessions in Hankou and Tianjin before 1917, and beginning a new project on Russian commerce and shipping in East Asia in the 19th century. 「 The Tea Trade with China in Russian Imperial Imaginaries (19th/early 20th centuries) 」 This paper will examine aspects of the organisation and representation of the Russian Empire’s trade in tea in the second half of the nineteenth century. Access to the treaty ports of China from 1860 allowed Russian tea traders to begin transporting their goods by sea, through the Indian Ocean and, after it opened, the Suez Canal. However, the older cross-border trade was maintained, largely for geopolitical reasons. I suggest that the ways in which these two routes were represented interacted with processes of identity formation and the production of space, primarily through comparison with other empires. The tea trade through these two different environments was thus a mechanism by which transnational circulations of both ideas and commodities contributed to the imagined geography of Russian imperialism. #NYUShanghai Facebook Twitter Instagram Weibo Youtube CONTACT US Email: cga@nyu.edu Phone Number: +86 (21) 20595032 WeChat: NYUShanghaiCGA Address: 1555 Century Avenue, Pudong New Area, Shanghai, China. © 2018 All Rights Reserved © 2018 All Rights Reserved ON THE SITE About Us People Events News Publications Research Projects Database #NYUShanghai Facebook Twitter Instagram Weibo Youtube MAIN LINKS New York Shanghai Abu Dhabi             CONTACT US       Email: cga@nyu.edu       Phone Number: +86 (21) 20595032       WeChat: NYUShanghaiCGA  

Morris Rossabi City University of New York; Columbia Unviersity Biography Author or Editor of twenty-six books, including Khubilai Khan, Modern Mongolia, Voyager from Xanadu, and A History of China, Morris Rossabi (Ph.D, Columbia) is Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York and Adjunct Professor of History at Columbia University.  Born in Egypt, he conducts research in East Asian and Middle Eastern languages and has written four chapters in the definitive Cambridge History of China. He has collaborated on Chinese art exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Asian Art Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  Awarded an honorary doctorate from the National University of Mongolia, he has written a Global History of the period from 1000 to 1450. 「 Mongol Impact on Eurasia: Lasting Influences 」 Starting in the 1980s, specialists challenged the conventional wisdom about the Mongol Empire’s almost entirely destructive influence on global history. They asserted that that Mongols promoted vital economic, social, and cultural exchanges among civilizations. Chinggis Khan, Khubilai Khan, and other rulers supported trade, adopted policies of toleration toward foreign religions, and served as patrons of the arts, architecture, and theater. Exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art confirmed that the Mongol era witnessed extraordinary developments in painting, ceramics, manuscript illustration, and textiles. To be sure, specialists did not ignore the destruction and killings that the Mongols engendered. This reevaluation has prompted both sophisticated and less well-informed analyses of the Mongols’ legacy in Eurasian history. The Ming dynasty, the Mongols’ successor in China, adopted some of the principles of Mongol military organization and tactics and were exposed to Tibetan Buddhism and Persian astronomy and medicine. The Mongols introduced agricultural techniques, porcelain, and artistic motifs to the Middle East, and

Lisa Raphals University of California Riverside Biography Lisa Raphals (瑞麗) studies the cultures of early China and Classical Greece, with interests in comparative philosophy and history of science. She is Professor of Chinese, Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California Riverside, and Chair, Program in Classical Studies and Program in Comparative Ancient Civilizations. She is the author of Knowing Words: Wisdom and Cunning in the Classical Traditions of China and Greece (Cornell, 1992), Sharing the Light: Representations of Women and Virtue in Early China (SUNY, 1998), and Divination and Prediction in Early China and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 2013); and co-editor of Old Society, New Belief: Religious transformation of China and Rome, ca. 1st-6th Centuries (Oxford, 2017). Representative scholarly articles include: “Skeptical Strategies in the Zhuangzi and Theaetetus” (Philosophy East & West 1994), “Debates about Fate in Early China” (Études Chinoises 2014), “Sunzi versus Xunzi: Two Views of Deception and Indirection” (Early China 2016) and “Body and Mind in Early China and Greece” (Journal of Cognitive Historiography 2017). 「 Matteo Ricci’s Greek Sources and Chinese Writings 」 This paper looks at the broader context of Matteo Ricci’s (Li Madou) Chinese scientific writings. The first part is a discussion of the problem of cultural translation as a polyvalent interaction, both between China and “the West,” and between Christian Jesuits and the texts of Greco-Roman antiquity, using several examples, including the Xiguo jifa (Western Arts of Memory) and several texts based on, but with important differences from, the writings of Epictetus. The second part turns specific difficulties of translation in the Jihe yuanben (Elements of Euclid). #NYUShanghai Facebook Twitter Instagram Weibo Youtube CONTACT US Email: cga@nyu.edu Phone Number: +86 (21) 20595032 WeChat: NYUShanghaiCGA Address: 1555 Century Avenue, Pudong New Area, Shanghai, China. © 2018 All Rights Reserved © 2018 All Rights Reserved ON

Robert Parthesius New York University Abu Dhabi Biography Robert Parthesius obtained his PhD from the University of Amsterdam. He is Associate Professor in Museum and Heritage Studies at NYUAD and director of ‘Dhakira’ – Center for Heritage Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). He is chairman of the Center for International Heritage Activities, and Associate Professor Archaeology at the Leiden University in The Netherlands. From his studies and work at the University of Amsterdam he developed an interest in interdisciplinary research on the crossroad of history, archaeology and anthropology. Initially working as curator of the Amsterdam Museum and lecturer at the University of Amsterdam he developed a track record of research projects and museum exhibitions in Europe, Asia and Australia. Significant projects include the experimental reconstruction of the VOC ship Batavia in the Netherlands (1985-1995) and the excavation of the Dutch East-Indiaman Avondster in Galle, Sri Lanka (1997-2007). He has curated international exhibitions on cultural exchange between Europe and Asia in the Australia, Japan, Sri Lanka and Amsterdam. During his work in Sri Lanka Robert Parthesius developed an interest in heritage studies and the complex relationship between local communities, indigenous knowledge and the understanding of heritage. In 2006 he was appointed as director of the CIE–Centre for international Heritage Activities and associate professor at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands. This institutional base allowed him to further his ideas on alternative heritage management models in our globalizing world. Programs in Afghanistan and sub-Saharan Africa in cooperation with local partners allowed him to bring theory into practice. He has organized research and field schools for NYUAD on World Heritage Sites connected through historical Arabian Trade Routes. He has organized at NYUAD the international conferences ‘The Unpredictable Past’ (2014) and ‘Connected Through Heritage’(2015) and is co-organizer of ‘Dialogues with the

Weilin Pan Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Biography Weilin Pan is an assistant professor at the Institute of China Studies of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. Since 2014, she has been an adjunct assistant professor with the China Studies Postgraduate Program at the Shanghai International Studies University. She earned her doctoral degree in History from Fudan University in 2010. She was a visiting scholar at APSI Duke University (2008-2009) and The Carter Center, Atlanta (2015) and the 2017 Robinson Scholar at the British Museum. Her academic interests include material culture of modern China, China in modern English literature as well as overseas China Studies. She is the editor of Material Culture in Modern China (Shanghai Rare Book Press, 2015). Her forthcoming book is about the transformation of the paper-offering handicraft industry (tinfoil making) in Twentieth-Century Zhejiang. 「 The 19th Century European Travelers and the Chinese “Hell Money” Collections in Europe 」 This paper will examine the formation of the collections of so-called “hell money” in the Western museums and library. “Hell money” is the paper money burnt for the use of the dead. As an important object in the Chinese rituals honoring the divine and the deceased, it immediately attracts the attention of the Western sojourners in China and becomes collectible ephemera. The difficulty of cataloguing and presenting such items in the Western museums is well reflected in the exotic and awkward term “hell money”. The story starts with the Nineteenth Century Western missionaries, merchants, diplomats, as well as travelers in China who endeavored to establish themselves as the early generation of the “amateur sinologists” with the “on-the-ground” experiences. Hence the invention of the Chinese “hell money” in the English language is a curious yet important case in the cultural encounter between China and the West. This preliminary study

Christopher Paik New York University Abu Dhabi Biography Christopher Paik is an assistant professor of political science at NYUAD. He specializes in the study of diverging sociopolitical and economic processes from both spatial and historical perspectives. His current research involves various topics including long-run determinants of development and growth, sources of enduring cultural differences, and legacies of colonization. He received his PhD in political economics from Stanford University. 「 The Global Economic Order before (and after) Western Hegemony: Chinese-Middle Eastern Trade from the Silk Road to “the Belt and Road” Initiative 」 The Silk Road stretched across Eurasia to connect the East and the West for centuries.  At its height, the network of trade routes enabled merchants to travel from Japan to the Mediterranean Sea, carrying with them high-value goods for trade. Along with this inter-regional trade came political, economic and cultural exchange that were crucial for the development of early civilizations and urban growth.  In this paper, we trace the historical network of trade routes across Eurasia, along which urban centers thrived or withered as a function of both political shocks as well as breakthroughs in navigation on the part of European explorers who sought direct sea routes to the East.  We consider the historical growth of cities in China and the eastern parts of the Muslim world to understand how shocks to trade impacted economic development.  In doing so, we challenge a Euro-centric approach to world history through an examination of the two most developed world cultures of the medieval period, China and the Muslim world. #NYUShanghai Facebook Twitter Instagram Weibo Youtube CONTACT US Email: cga@nyu.edu Phone Number: +86 (21) 20595032 WeChat: NYUShanghaiCGA Address: 1555 Century Avenue, Pudong New Area, Shanghai, China. © 2018 All Rights Reserved © 2018 All Rights Reserved ON THE SITE About Us People Events News

Ayesha Omer New York University Biography Ayesha Omer is a PhD candidate at NYU’s Department of Media, Culture & Communication. 「 Future Imaginaries of Gwadar Port Terminal: Mediating Trans-regional Encounters along the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor 」 This paper explores the construction and expansion of Gwadar’s port terminal as a central project of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. It is situated on the site of Gwadar’s port infrastructure to map the emergent dynamics of negotiation, coercion, engagement, between state, local, and trans-regional actors. #NYUShanghai Facebook Twitter Instagram Weibo Youtube CONTACT US Email: cga@nyu.edu Phone Number: +86 (21) 20595032 WeChat: NYUShanghaiCGA Address: 1555 Century Avenue, Pudong New Area, Shanghai, China. © 2018 All Rights Reserved © 2018 All Rights Reserved ON THE SITE About Us People Events News Publications Research Projects Database #NYUShanghai Facebook Twitter Instagram Weibo Youtube MAIN LINKS New York Shanghai Abu Dhabi             CONTACT US       Email: cga@nyu.edu       Phone Number: +86 (21) 20595032       WeChat: NYUShanghaiCGA       Address: 1555 Century Avenue,       Pudong New Area, Shanghai, China.

Max Moerman Columbia University Biography D. Max Moerman (Ph. D. Stanford University, 1999) is Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures, Barnard College, Columbia University and Co-Chair of the Columbia University Seminar on Buddhist Studies. His research interests lie in the visual and material culture of pre-modern Japanese Buddhism. His publications have examined such topics as the representation of pilgrimage landscapes in painting, literature, and ritual; the burial of sutras and Buddhist images at sites in Northern Kyushu and at the Ise shrines; the death of the Buddha in medieval painting and Edo-period print culture; islands of women in the history of Japanese cartography; narrative and iconographic traditions of lepers and hot springs; woodblock printed talismans used in feudal oaths, economic contracts, and legal disputes; and the history of the Japanese Buddhist world map. 「 Japan, Jambudvipa, and the European World: Cartographic and Cosmological Hybridity in Japanese Folding Screens 」 Maps of the world painted on large-format folding screens constituted a radically new and profoundly hybrid form of visual and material culture in seventeen-century Japan. First produced at Jesuit painting academies within Japan –– and based on such European cartographic sources as the world maps of Mercator, Ortelius, Blaeu, and van den Keere –– these screens display a level of appropriation and transformation far beyond any simple notion of cartographic reproduction and reveal the transcultural encounter between Europe and Asia as multidirectional and multivalent. This paper analyzes examples of cartographic folding screens in which a map of the global world introduced by European Jesuits, entitled the World as a Globe (Typus Orbis Terrarum) is paired with a map of the Japanese archipelago situated within the Buddhist geography of a flat earth, entitled Map of Great Japan within the Continent of Jambudvīpa (Nansenbushū dainihon shōtōzu).  I examine such

Magnus Marsden University of Sussex Biography Magnus Marsden is Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the Asia Centre at the University of Sussex. He has conducted long term field research in adjacent parts of South and Central Asia with a focus on the role played by religious, political, and commercial networks in the region’s integration into global dynamics. Having focused on the impact of reformist Islamic teachings on the everyday lives of Muslims in northern Pakistan, he then initiated a study of Afghan trading networks, initially focusing on the role these played in cross-border relations between Afghanistan, Pakistan and Tajikistan, and then expanding the scope of his study to Eurasia and West Asia. He is currently the PI of a European Research Council Advanced Grant that is exploring the status of Yiwu – an international trade city in China’s Zhejiang Province – as a node in the global trade of low-cost commodities. His most recent monograph is Trading Worlds: Afghan Merchants across Modern Frontiers (New York: OUP, 2016). 「 Afghan Networks and Circulations in and beyond Eurasia 」 This paper will explore the insights that a consideration of Afghan traders operating in the city of Yiwu in China’s Zhejiang Province offer into understanding the shifting dynamics of trans-Eurasian trade. Simultaneously tracking the movement of commercial personnel, commodities and capital across a vast geographical expanse that stretches between China’s eastern seaboard and the Black Seaport of Odessa, the paper will identify significant junctures in the consolidation of Afghan trading networks across Eurasia over the past fifty years. From the role these merchants played in forging routes between China and Russia in the early 1990s to their ‘discovery’ of the city of Yiwu’s potential significance as a node for their activities in the late 1990s, and their more recent decision to

Bill Mak Kyoto University Biography Bill M. Mak completed his linguistic training at McGill University (B.A. Hons.) specializing in Sanskrit and East Asian languages and received his Ph.D. in Indian literature and Buddhist philology from Peking University. Mak held a number of research and teaching positions at Hamburg University, Hong Kong University and Kyoto Sangyo University, Chulalongkorn University, New York University and Brown University, and is currently Associate Professor at Kyoto University. His research interests include history of science in Asia, Sanskrit manuscripts and Buddhist philology. Some of his major publications include “The last chapter of Sphujidhvaja’s Yavanajātaka critically edited with notes” (SCIAMVS, 2013), “Yusi Jing – A treatise of ‘Western’ astral science in Chinese and its versified version Xitian yusi jing” (SCIAMVS, 2014), and Foreign Astral Sciences in China: From Six Dynasties to Northern Song (Forthcoming, Routledge). 「 Greek Astral Science in China 」 This paper examines the three phases of Greek astral sciences introduced to China by the Nestorians, Perso-Arabs and the Jesuits. Though ultimately springing from the same sources, largely based on the works of Ptolemy and his contemporaries, who have established themselves as authority in the subject in Western Europe and the Byzantine Empire from the middle of the first millennium for over a thousand years, the Greek science practiced and brought by these foreigners carried unique characteristics of their own. As the cosmologies encapsulated in these works as well as the accompanying scientific concepts and techniques were drastically different from those of the indigenous Chinese, each of these “foreign waves” left a different impression in the Chinese world, with different degrees of impact which can be observed both historically even today. Some of the legacies of these ongoing dialogues between the Greek and the Chinese can be seen in the East Asian planetary week, the