Handbooks and Anthologies for Officials in Imperial China: A Descriptive and Critical Bibliography (2 vols), by Pierre-Étienne Will [Book Review]

Abstract

In November of 2013, Pierre-Étienne Will delivered a series of lectures at UCLA on administrative handbooks and anthologies in imperial China. Attending those talks fundamentally altered the trajectory of my research career. I had been working with materials from the Ba County collection at the Sichuan Provincial Archives for several years at that point. I considered myself no stranger to late imperial local administration. I had slowly and painstakingly worked from the yamen archive up to reconstruct both official and ad hoc county-level processes that linked the magistrate to the population he was charged to govern. In the course of a few days Will revealed to me how much more there was to learn. The questions he used to frame his lectures changed the way that I thought about my relationship to the yamen as mediated by the archive. How was information about administration disseminated, how was it organized, how did the substance of that information change over time, and how were the audiences or uses of that information identified, created, or reinforced by the many and distinct ways that these works circulated? A new world of research possibilities appeared suddenly before me.

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