Programme | HKU SHS

This talk examines how diasporas, trade, and networks of interaction developed in the “adolescence” of Sino-Southeast Asian contact, in the time-period roughly covered by the thousand years between 600 and 1600 CE. We know very little about the “infancy” of these dealings, in the years before the T’ang. But by that dynasty, patterns of contact slowly began to develop on a more systemic basis, particularly with some of the coastal landscapes of Monsoon Asia, into and including the Indian Ocean. I examine the growth and eventual flourishing of these interactions, especially through the power of commercial networks focused on certain specific commodities, and try to situate them in the larger milieu of what is often called the “maritime silk road”. By focusing on export ceramics heading south, and marine biota heading north, we can learn much about how networks actually "worked" on the oceanic pathways of Asia.

Eric Tagliacozzo

Eric Tagliacozzo is the John Stambaugh Professor of History at Cornell. He is the author of a history of smuggling in Southeast Asia (Yale, 2005) which won the AAS’s Harry J. Benda Prize in 2007, a monograph on the pilgrimage to Mecca from that region (Oxford, 2013), and a history of oceanic connections in Asia writ-large (Princeton, 2022). He is also the editor or co-editor of a dozen other volumes on a variety of trans-national topics in Asian History, including the Asia Inside Out trilogy from Harvard University Press. He is the Director of the Cornell Southeast Asia Program (SEAP), and serves as one of the two editors of the journal INDONESIA. He was also previously the co-director of the Migrations Initiative at Cornell, a large program funded by the Mellon Foundation on global migrations.

Dr. Devika Shankar

Devika SHANKAR is an assistant professor of History at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests primarily lie in environmental history, legal history and science and technology studies. She is the author of An Encroaching Sea: Nature, Sovereignty and Development at the Edge of British India 1860-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2024) which looks at the history of coastal erosion and port development in southwestern India. She has also written separately on property rights, princely sovereignty, and infrastructure development in the context of South Asia and the Indian Ocean.

Panel 1
East-West Exchanges in the Early Modern World

11:00–12:30
2.58, Central Podiums Level

Chair:
FANG Yi
University of Hong Kong

Tommaso PEPE, University of International Business and Economics, Beijing

A Postmodern Middle Ages? Marco Polo, The Catalan Atlas, and the Digital Turn in Medieval Cartography

The relationship between Marco Polo’s Devisement dou Monde and the Catalan Atlas represents one of the most complex intersections between medieval travel literature and the history of cartography. This paper first reassesses the influence of Polo’s narrative on the atlas, identifying more than forty toponyms and visual elements that the Catalan Atlas directly derived from Polo’s text. More substantially, however, it argues for a fundamental redefinition of our digital approaches to this celebrated mappa mundi. While previous digital engagements with the atlas have often focused on transcription initiatives, this study—and its accompanying digital project—introduces the first dedicated GIS (Geographic Information System) interface designed to analyse the Catalan Atlas’s complex spatial, textual, and visual stratifications. Finally, to promote global and decolonial engagement with the atlas, the project incorporates an experimental translation of its legends into Chinese, aiming to expand the traditionally Eurocentric scholarly discourse surrounding this cartographic masterpiece. By merging GIS methodologies and an intercultural translation effort, this project seeks to open new operational frameworks for studies on medieval cartographies where Digital Humanities can both help to visualise complex historical narratives and expand a medieval artefact’s significance within a global and decolonised academic discourse.

Tommaso PEPE (he/him) a literary historian specialising in Italian language and culture, travel literature, Holocaust studies, Digital Humanities and GIS applications for cultural studies. Originally trained in Italian literary history, his doctoral research focused on the impact of the Holocaust in post-war culture. He is also interested in the relevance of Holocaust memory in a global age marked by resurgences of ethnic hatred, state-sanctioned violence, religious and political persecution. In the field of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, he has been working on travel narratives connecting Europe and Asia—especially, but not only, Marco Polo—and the use of digital technologies for literary and historical studies. He is currently working on a Digital Humanities project focusing on a digital mapping of Marco Polo’s travels at www.mappingpolo.com, and serves as digital editor and contributor for the website of the Association of Italian Teachers in China (www.aiilic.com). Before joining the University of International Business and Economics, he worked at Wenzhou-Kean University, Guangzhou Maritime University, the Society of Fellows at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in Shenzhen; and conducted research at the University of Pavia (Italy), Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), University of Cambridge (UK), Brown University (US), and Hamburg Universität (Germany).

Massimo BOMBONI, Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, Torino

Households, Mobility, and Coercion in Early Modern Macao: Rethinking Italian Participation in the Luso-Asian World

This paper presents a work-in-progress that reconsiders the place of European—specifically Italian—private actors within the social and coercive ecologies of Maritime East Asia. Rather than offering a finished reconstruction of a single merchant’s trajectory, it uses the figure of the Florentine Orazio Neretti (active c. 1580–1640) as an entry point for broader questions concerning mobility, domesticity, and dependency in the Luso-Asian world. The paper moves beyond dominant narratives centred on missionaries or traveller-adventurers by examining the microstructures through which non-Iberian Europeans became embedded in the everyday mechanics of colonial life: households, informal patronage, mixed-descent families, and the shifting boundaries between free and unfree labour.

Macao offers a privileged observatory for these dynamics. As a space shaped by constant negotiation between Chinese authorities, Portuguese settlers, and a highly mobile Asian population, the city’s domestic environments operated simultaneously as commercial units, sites of cultural mediation, and nodes of coerced mobility. Yet the presence of Italians—merchants, brokers, and intermediaries—remains marginal in existing historiography. Their integration into local systems of servitude, linguistic brokerage, and social reproduction raises questions that speak to several themes of the conference: the circulation of knowledge, the constitution of alternative archives, and the fragility of historical narratives structured by gaps, silences, and fragmentary documentation.

Drawing on scattered traces from Portuguese, Chinese, and Italian archives, the paper maps the relational worlds in which figures like Neretti operated: the dependants incorporated into their households, the linguistic intermediaries shaped by Christian catechesis, and the Asian individuals whose coerced trajectories intersected with European commercial networks. Rather than offering a conclusive biography, it addresses the methodological challenges of writing history from such microfragments and considers how these lives—partly documented, partly recoverable, and partly irretrievable—may reshape current understandings of early modern global connections.

Massimo BOMBONI (he/him) is an Early Modern historian and postdoctoral researcher at the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi in Turin (Italy). He holds a PhD in Global History of Empires from the University of Turin, where his dissertation, The New Gateway to the World: Ferdinando I de’ Medici, the Dutch Republic, and the Informal Routes of Global Trade in the Early Seventeenth Century, examined the role of informal networks, commercial brokerage, and small-state agency in shaping early modern global connections. His research lies at the intersection of global and maritime history, imperial history, and cross-cultural brokerage, with a particular focus on the role of Italian actors in the connected histories of the Mediterranean and Asia. He is currently developing a postdoctoral project on the Florentine merchant Orazio Neretti and the commercial, social, and cultural networks linking Italy, Portuguese Asia, and Maritime East Asia. Adopting a microhistorical and transimperial perspective, his current work explores mobility, dependency, coerced labour, and the circulation of knowledge in the Luso-Asian world, with particular attention to Macau. He has published on Tuscan maritime history, Medici global networks, and early modern cultural encounters.

Diki SHERPA, Ashoka University

China in Sir William Jones’ Universal History

In 1790, in his Seventh Anniversary Discourse as President of the Asiatic(k) Society in Calcutta, Sir William Jones addressed the question “whence came the singular people who had long governed China,” interestingly estimated that the Chinese Empire emerged around 1200 BCE and that the Chinese “nation” were speculated to be an offshoot of “Hindu” lineage. This paper examines how such claims of genealogical affinity were produced within 18th-century Orientalist scholarship. Jones’s construction of China emerged at the intersection of the specific European debates on universal history and the Orientalist epistemic practices through which these debates were worked out, particularly philological comparison, Sanskrit textual authority, and chronological reasoning. In doing so, Jones not only used India as a tool of interpretation, but also transformed China in ways that made it intelligible and usable within his framework of Biblical universal history.

Diki SHERPA (she/her) is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History at Ashoka University. She holds a PhD in History from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include the British Empire in colonial South Asia and Hong Kong, with particular attention to how colonial knowledge was produced, circulated, and used in governance.

Panel 2A
Knowledge Production in the Making of East Asian Imperialism

14:00–15:30
2.58, Central Podiums Level

Chair:
Linquan MA
King's College London, University of Hong Kong

Yutao CHEN, Harvard University

Winds of Empire: Japan’s Maritime Meteorological Observation in the Pacific during the Interwar Period

This paper examines how Japan established a meteorological observation network across the West Pacific during the interwar period, and how this network facilitated imperial expansion. Drawing on naval proposals, observatory reports, and colonial administrative records from the South Seas Mandate (Nanyō), it traces how weather observation reorganised time, space, and knowledge in a region where Japan’s ideological ambitions confronted unfamiliar terrain.

The paper first explains how wireless law disciplined civil vessels and trained them to operate as entities across long distances. Through this training, ships were able to operate at the Empire’s meteorological outposts, and it integrated Japan into a trans-imperial network of Pacific observation. The paper then turned to explore how Japan monitored typhoons and explained how the Navy synchronised fishing boats and land-based observatories across different time zones. Second, it examines the Navy’s effort to synchronise fishing boats, fisheries cooperatives, and land-based observatories across different time zones through radio communications and cables. It argues that isobars used in weather charts were a scientific tool that helped Japan tackle the question of scale, but it also generated epistemic anxiety and pushed the Empire to build more outposts for scrutinisation. The paper then revealed a geographical paradox for the observatories, and demonstrated how it generated a moment of ignorance in Japan’s observatories in the South Seas.

Rather than treating scientific error as simple failure, this paper argues that the imperfections of Japan’s observation network were often the product of deliberate ignorance embedded in the infrastructure. This was information not neglected but filtered through infrastructures designed to serve expansionist ends. The South Seas were rendered legible as a zone of resource extraction rather than habitation, and indigenous islanders’ vulnerability to tropical storms registered only as a side effect of systems the Empire wished to track for its own protection. In this way, meteorology did not merely support Japan’s southward advance—it accelerated it.

Yutao CHEN (she/her) is a first-year master’s student in the Regional Studies–East Asia (RSEA) programme at Harvard University. Yutao’s scholarly interests include empire and colonialism, environmental history, and history of science and technology. Yutao’s current work focuses on Japan’s meteorological observation activities in the West Pacific. She is especially drawn to interactions between empires and colonies in the Pacific, and how Japanese ships manoeuvre themselves in legally ambiguous sea lanes. Also drawn to the history of aid programmes in “Southeast Asia”, Yutao is now learning Bahasa Indonesia.

Ran TAI, University of Groningen

The Last Imperial Civil Service Examination and the Debate on the Meaning of Civilisation in Early 20th-Century Vietnam

This paper examines the emergence of “civilisation” (văn minh) in early 20th-century Vietnam as a category of practice, actively deployed by historical actors to negotiate political authority, moral order, and historical change. Rather than treating văn minh as a neutral analytical concept or a passive translation of a Western term, the paper situates it within a longer Confucian civilisational grammar rooted in giáo hóa (Ch. jiaohua; “edification”). Drawing on Sino-Vietnamese and early quốc ngữ sources, the paper focuses on a pivotal yet understudied episode: the final imperial civil service examination of the Nguyễn Dynasty, in which Emperor Khải Định posed a policy question explicitly framed around the problem of “civilisation,” and Nguyễn Bá Trác’s subsequent response to this question published in Nam Phong journal. Read together, the imperial examination question and the intellectual reply reveal how văn minh functioned not merely as an abstract idea, but as a practical and normative language through which governance, reform, and cultural hierarchy were articulated. The analysis shows that while evolutionary and progressive vocabularies associated with modern civilisation had entred Vietnamese discourse through East Asian Sinographic translational networks, they did not displace older Confucian assumptions about moral pedagogy and state authority. Instead, văn minh operated as a hybrid idiom that reconfigured Confucian civilisational logic under colonial conditions. By foregrounding “civilisation” as a category of practice embedded in institutional settings and elite debate, this paper contributes to broader discussions on translation, historical narrative, and the institutionalisation of intangible ideas in Asia’s transition to modernity.

Ran TAI (he/him) completed his Bachelor of Arts in Chinese Language and Literature at Beijing Normal University. In 2016, he moved to the Netherlands to pursue a master’s degree in Asian Studies at Leiden University under the supervision of Prof. Kiri Paramore. In 2017, he studied as an exchange student at the University of British Columbia (Canada). He graduated cum laude in 2019 with a thesis examining the emergence of modern Vietnamese historiography. In March 2026, he obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). His doctoral thesis investigates the emergence of the modern nation-states of Vietnam, with particular attention to historical narratives and civilisational transformation.

Ran has published a chapter in Vietnam Over the Long Twentieth Century: Global Vietnam: Across Time, Space and Community, edited by Liam C. Kelley and Gerard Sasges (Singapore: Springer, 2024). He has also signed a contract with Cambridge University Press as a contributor to The Cambridge History of Confucianism, edited by Kiri Paramore. He intends to continue his academic career and contribute to scholarship on East and Southeast Asian political and intellectual history, approaching these topics through an increasingly global-historical and transregional perspective.

Tianlin FU, University of Hong Kong

Institute Networks and Knowledge Production in the Shanghai Problem: Lionel Curtis and the Feetham Investigation, 1927–1932

In the late 1920s, the relationship between the British government and its Shanghai settler community grew increasingly fraught in the wake of the May Thirtieth Incident, while Sino-British negotiations over extraterritoriality threatened the privileges of the Shanghai International Settlement. Amid this crisis, Lionel Curtis and his institute network stepped in, partnering with the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC) to commission an ostensibly independent inquiry under South African judge Richard Feetham into the future of the Settlement. Drawing on SMC archives, British diplomatic correspondence, and the records of Chatham House, this article reconstructs how this network was assembled, how it helped produce the Feetham Report, and how the report was circulated across London, Washington, and Shanghai. It argues that Curtis, by mobilising the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) into a coordinated institute network, built upon existing imperial knowledge circuits in China to produce third-party expert knowledge and disseminate it through the institutes’ established official and private channels to metropolitan policymakers and the press. It further shows that

the network functioned as a resource that actors across the imperial system— the SMC, British diplomats in China, and the Foreign Office— selectively drew upon to advance their respective positions, rather than simply endorsing or rejecting it. Bridging the histories of interwar institutes and British colonialism in China, the article reveals how interwar knowledge-producing institutes such as the RIIA intervened in Britain’s colonial politics beyond the formal empire, operating through networked forms.

Tianlin FU (he/him) is a PhD student in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. He holds an MA from Fudan University (Shanghai) and a BA from South China University of Technology (Guangzhou). His current research focuses on British colonialism in China, British leftist intellectual history, and the urban history of Shanghai. Prior to his doctoral studies, Tianlin gained three years of full-time professional experience in brand marketing and public relations within the FMCG and biopharmaceutical sectors.

Panel 2B
(Un)natural Sciences, Uncanny Journeys

14:00–15:30
CPD 2.42, Central Podiums Level

Chair:
Rebecca Si-ning WANG, University of Hong Kong

Seongun PARK, Harvard University

What the Record Says—Or Doesn’t: Earthquakes, Historiographical Shifts, and the Remaking of Disaster in the Qing Veritable Records

How do disasters become part of “official history,” and what does it mean when the state chooses to record—or not record—them? This paper examines the institution of official historiography in early modern China by tracing how environmental crises were narrated, selectively documented, and transformed into enduring public memory. Focusing on shifting patterns of earthquake reporting in the Qing shilu (Veritable Records of the Qing Dynasty), I ask how, when, and why disasters entered the authoritative historical record, or were rendered unworthy of documentation. I argue that this selectivity was structured by changing assumptions about what counts as “disaster,” what kinds of knowledge are administratively useful, and how the state shapes and mobilises public memory for political ends. This paper is an attempt to explore the intersection of ideas on environmental anomalies, institutional practices of history-writing, and the politics of collective memory.

Through close readings of earthquake entries alongside their conspicuous absences, I identify a critical shift in 18th-century China. As earthquakes were progressively demoralised and depoliticised—moving from Heaven’s moral and political portents to administrative risks that needed to be managed through bureaucratic interventions—events that earlier court historians recorded in detail and with moral urgency became abbreviated, recategorised, or omitted altogether. By redefining what disasters meant and how they should be remembered, I argue, the Qing state worked to build a more resilient mode of governance and secure enduring political legitimacy in the face of recurrent crises. Methodologically, this paper treats omission as a central object of analysis. Silence, instead of being a simple lack of evidence, can be read as an “alternative archive” that speaks to shifting epistemic boundaries and institutional priorities. Attending to what official history withholds as well as what it preserves reveals the deeper structures of early modern statecraft.

Seongun PARK (he/him) is a PhD Candidate in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, specialising in the political, intellectual, and environmental history of late imperial China. His current research examines the political, epistemic, and cultural frameworks that shaped disaster discourse in China from the 16th to the 19th century. More broadly, he is interested in political legitimation, knowledge production, Sino-European cultural exchange, and public memory.

YEW Ying Han, National University of Singapore

Weed Doesn’t Exist: Lalang, Grasses and the Making of Modern Malaya

Agronomists and farmers classify many kinds of grasses as weeds because they consider them to be unwanted plants on cultivated land. This idea has become widely accepted today. The most prominent example is lalang grass (Imperata cylindrica). Lalang is native to Southeast Asia, yet it is widely perceived as an invasive species and a notorious weed in everyday understanding. It has also been metaphorically associated with uncontrollability and disorder in modernisation narratives.

This study argues that the so-called “weediness” of lalang was constructed during the colonial period in Malaya. Colonial officials and agricultural scientists played a key role in framing lalang as a problematic plant to justify land management and economic policies. Lalang came to be regarded as hostile and useless not just because of its ecological functions—such as rapid regeneration and extensive underground roots—but because colonial administrators and plantation capitalists required a demonised natural symbol to legitimise land dispossession and labour discipline.

The stigmatisation of grasses marginalised more flexible and situational local practices of managing and living with lalang. While local communities also regarded lalang as troublesome in certain contexts, they developed techniques to manage, utilise, and adapt to it within everyday agricultural practices. Colonial discourse, by contrast, redefined lalang as an absolute ecological and economic threat, transforming a diverse and negotiated relationship into a rigid category of “weed.” This process also extended to communities deemed disorderly, as the emergence of lalang was linked to peasants’ “uncivilised” cultivation practices, shaping it as an enemy of the plantation economy and framing it as a threat to modern infrastructure.

By tracing how lalang knowledge and recognition were transformed in modern Malayan history, this study highlights the entanglements of plants, governance, and everyday life, and reveals the limits of colonial and capitalist attempts to standardise both plants and landscapes.

YEW Ying Han (he/him) is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. His research investigates how plants often dismissed as weeds, particularly lalang (Imperata cylindrica), shape human–environment relations in Southeast Asia. His work examines the intersections of crop cultivation, plantation economies, infrastructure, and indigenous communities with processes of state-making and socio-political change. He also engages with broader research interests in the history of martial arts.

Victoria CHUNG, Oxford University

The Reception of Mendeleev’s Periodic System and Atomism in Oxford Chemistry

This project examines the reception and consolidation of Mendeleev’s periodic system and atomism within Oxford chemistry between 1880 and 1915. Mendeleev’s arrangement of the elements by atomic weight and recurring chemical properties was not the first scheme of its kind, but it was distinctive for its flexibility and predictive power, including the correction of atomic weights and the anticipation of undiscovered elements. Yet its authority was not immediately secure. In the late 19th century, atomism remained philosophically contested: atoms functioned as useful explanatory tools, but their status as real physical entities was still debated, and even Mendeleev expressed caution about their ontological certainty. By the 1880s, the periodic system was influential but not fully consolidated. Its authority depended not only on predictive successes, such as the discovery of gallium, but on its integration into chemical practice. Oxford provides a revealing microhistorical setting for this process, given its relatively late development compared to German centres of chemistry. I argue that the authority of the periodic system in Britain was secured not simply by prediction, but through its gradual incorporation into institutional teaching and practice. Reception, in this sense, was a process of disciplinary consolidation, through which periodic classification and atomism became constitutive principles of chemical knowledge.

Victoria CHUNG (she/her) is an MSc student in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology at the University of Oxford. She previously obtained an MSci in Chemistry from Imperial College London. Her research focuses on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of chemistry and material culture, with particular interest in the reception of the periodic system and atomism, and in how scientific practices are shaped, justified, and made credible within their historical contexts.

Panel 3
Rethinking Diaspora: Kinship and Belonging on the Margins

15:45–17:15
2.58, Central Podiums Level

Chair:
Nicole VAUGHAN
University of Hong Kong

You LAN, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

At the Edge of Intimacy: Women, Minglingzi, and the Fear of Possibility in Emigrant Households

This paper examines emigrant communities in Guangdong in the early 20th century, focusing on debates surrounding minglingzi—the adoption of sons from outside the patrilineal line—within households shaped by long-term male migration. Drawing on qiaokan (overseas Chinese periodicals circulated between emigrant communities and their home regions), it begins from a striking imbalance: explicit reports of sexual relationships between adoptive mothers and adopted sons, framed as incest, were extremely rare, yet they were repeatedly discussed in editorial commentary as a recurring social problem.

Rather than asking whether such relationships were widespread, the paper shifts attention to why they were written about insistently. The authors of these texts—typically educated men working within school- or library-based publishing networks—were not simply fabricating scandals, but selecting and amplifying particular cases. In doing so, they turned exceptional incidents into sites for articulating concerns about family order, morality, and the perceived fragility of lineage structures under migration.

I argue that these narratives are best understood not as evidence of a common practice, but as a way of marking the outer limits of what had become imaginable in emigrant households. Under conditions of prolonged separation, women took on greater responsibility in managing domestic affairs, while minglingzi itself blurred distinctions between kin and non-kin. Within this context, the possibility of transgressive intimacy—however infrequent—became thinkable. The anxiety expressed in qiaokan was therefore less a reaction to widespread behavior than to the instability of the boundaries themselves.
In this sense, the repeated invocation of “incest” reveals a recognition, however uneasy, that women in emigrant households occupied a space in which intimate relations could be reconfigured. By foregrounding the gap between rarity and repetition, this paper shows how moral discourse in the diaspora worked not simply to reflect social realities, but to define and contain emerging possibilities.

You LAN (she/they) is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on Chinese migration in the early twentieth century, especially connections between Guangdong and the United States. She is interested in gender, intimacy, and family life in trans-Pacific contexts, and how social norms were debated and reshaped through migration. Her dissertation examines topics including unconventional kinship practices, cross-gender performance, and interracial relationships, drawing on Chinese-language newspapers and other print sources. She has received support from the China–U.S. Scholars Program and the CCWH–Berkshire Conference.

Alicia LE, University of Hong Kong

Notes from Childhood Fields: The Translational Politics of Modern Vietnamese Memoirs

At the core of this presentation lies Miền thơ ấu (Childhood Fields), a moving account of a young Vietnamese boy’s adventures in a small, impoverished yet idyllic Catholic village in Tonkin under French colonialism and later, Japanese-occupied Hanoi. Written by former Vietnamese Workers’ Party dissident Vũ Thư Hiên (b. 1933, Hanoi) during his imprisonment for the Party’s 1964 “campaign against modern revisionism” following the Sino-Soviet split, the “novel” was first published in Vietnam in 1987, at the dawn of Vietnam’s Renovation era, and was awarded the highest accolade by the Vietnam Writers’ Association in 1988 for children’s literature.

In the first half, I will discuss the origins of the story against the backdrop of the Sino-Soviet split, which directly led to fractional fighting among Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s top leadership and the change of direction for re-unification with the South. As a result of the DRVN’s shift towards Beijing, pro-Soviet figures were barred from political life, including Vũ Thư Hiên and his father Vũ Đình Huỳnh, former Secretary for President Hồ Chí Minh during the 1946 Fontainebleau Conference. Thus, the composition of Childhood Fields embodies the enduring power of private, personal, and family histories as a response to prison and political trauma, while its publication history complicates the genre of “memoir” for historians of childhood and of Vietnam.

In the second half, I repeatedly return to the site of nostalgia—following the author’s exile in 1993 to Western Europe until 2022—through the act of archival research and literary translation. From this dual process, I conceive of how one is inevitably called to play the role of the historian whose mission to research and write a history of childhood stipulates the translation of memoirs; and in that process, becomes a translator whose destination is an active making of this childhood history in the global Anglophone market.

Alicia LE (she/they) is a historian, writer, translator, and cultural practitioner working between Hong Kong and Vietnam. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature and Hong Kong Studies from the University of Hong Kong, and is reading for an MPhil in History at her alma mater. Her current research project charts the historical construction of a modern indigenous Vietnamese childhood from the end of World War I to Vietnamese independence in August 1945, and beyond. For almost a decade, her research interests have spanned through Hong Kong–Southeast Asia historical connections, colonial extractivism, global Cold War, translation studies, and contemporary visual cultures from East/Southeast Asia—for which she sits on the editorial board of Art Nation, the first and only bilingual art publication in Vietnam. An alumna of the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) Summer School, she is the winner of the 2026 Stevns Translation Prize. Her translation of Vietnamese writer Maik Cây’s novel Bảo Tàng Lông (Museum of Hair) will be published in late 2027 by Two Lines Press (US) and Peirene Press (UK).

Jieluan HUANG, King’s College London

Between Systems: A London Chinese Medical Family and the Making of Diasporic Medicine

This paper examines what Chinese medicine becomes when it crosses a regulatory border. Its case study is a single London family: a father who trained at a state university of Chinese medicine in China and has practised in Britain since the 1990s, and three daughters whose careers have diverged across two countries and two medical systems. The British regulatory framework classifies the same clinical knowledge that Chinese institutions recognise as mainstream as complementary and alternative, reshaping how authority and expertise are distributed within the family. The pressures of migration have produced an intergenerational erosion of medical vocabulary that, in practice, functions as a loss of medical knowledge. And the gendered hierarchies structuring both Chinese medicine and British biomedicine have been partially rerouted, though not dissolved, by the institutional conditions that diaspora has made available to the daughters. What this family’s experience makes visible is that medical diaspora should not be adequately understood as either preservation or loss. It is a process of remaking that operates simultaneously at the levels of regulation, language, and gender.

Jieluan HUANG (she/her) is a PhD candidate in History at King’s College London. She holds a BA in History from the University of Warwick and an MA in History from University College London, completed in 2022. Her doctoral thesis, Medical Diaspora and the Making of Modern Medicine: Chinese Medicine in Post-War London, examines how medical knowledge and the people who carry it are reshaped through migration. Drawing on oral history interviews alongside archival sources, it follows practitioners, patients, and families as they navigate new institutional settings, regulatory frameworks, and the conditions of everyday diasporic life, tracing how knowledge is recognised, marginalised, or reworked in practice. The thesis situates understandings of the body within specific contexts and shows how they shift as those contexts change.

DAY 2

8 MAY 2026

Panel 4
Hong Kong: Pearl of the Orient?

9:00–10:30
2.58, Central Podiums Level

Chair:
CHENG Ho Lik Ron
University of Hong Kong

Iris Boyun LEI, University of Hong Kong

Internal Circulation and Labor Recruitment: Transoceanic South China Networks of Chinese Prostitution in Hong Kong, 1904–1935

Between the early 1900s and the 1930s, Shek Tong Tsui on Hong Kong Island and Yaumati in Kowloon ranked among the most prominent Chinese vice districts in the world. Existing scholarship has focused primarily on policy shifts and legal controversies surrounding prostitution under British colonial rule. This study, by contrast, moves beyond a strictly legal framework and adopts a social-historical perspective. By examining the labour sources of the Chinese prostitution industry, it seeks to clarify its underlying structures and modes of operation.

This study analyses the ‘internal circulation’ of Chinese prostitutes within a transoceanic South China network centred on Hong Kong, Canton, and Macau. Departing from narratives that emphasise coercive trafficking, it argues that strategic occupational mobility constituted a key foundation for the persistence of Hong Kong’s brothel system. Drawing on institutional archives—most notably more than 1,000 cases from Po Leung Kuk testimonies—the study demonstrates how prostitutes achieved a form of semi-autonomous mobility.

It identifies two key financial mechanisms, ‘advance payment’ and ‘pre-advance’. Together with female-led mutual aid networks, they enabled relatively safe and controlled relocation for ordinary prostitutes. The study also maps the hierarchical geography of this transregional market. Although the native-place origins of these women were highly concentrated in the Canton Delta, professional status was shaped primarily by workplace experience: Shanghai represented the apex of cultural prestige, Hong Kong functioned as a stable and economically lucrative core, and Southeast Asia served as a profitable yet culturally marginal alternative.

Iris Boyun LEI (she/her) is currently a PhD student in History at the University of Hong Kong. She holds a BA in History from Sichuan University and an MA in History from Fudan University. Her academic background is further enriched by exchange and summer programmes at National Chengchi University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Yale University. Iris specialises in gender history, Hong Kong history, and trans-Pacific history. Her current research examines the regulation and practical operation of the prostitution industry in Hong Kong from the 1900s to the 1930s. By adopting a micro-empirical approach and utilising quantitative archival data, her work explores the complex dynamics of the prostitution industry and resilience of the women involved.

Shirui ZHANG, University of Edinburgh

Between China and Britain: Identity Formation of the Tang Lineage in Hong Kong’s New Territories, 1898–1997

The Tang lineage in Hong Kong traces its origins to Jiangxi and settled in the New Territories during the Song Dynasty, becoming one of the most prominent lineage groups in the region. After the New Territories were incorporated into British colonial rule in 1898, the Tang lineage continued to function as a key local elite, operating within the interactions between colonial authority and local society. Between 1898 and 1997, the Tang lineage simultaneously emerged as a leader of resistance to British rule and as a beneficiary of colonial urbanisation policies. Previous research has largely examined the Tang lineage within a linear framework of Chineseness, emphasising cultural continuity and nationalist orientation. Less attention has been paid to how the Tang lineage constructed a composite identity across different phases of British colonial governance.

Methodologically, this research combines multilingual archival research with Digital Humanities approaches. By combining sentiment analysis with close reading, it constructs a digital corpus composed of official records from the British Hong Kong government, as well as genealogies, inscriptions, and commemorative texts produced by the Tang lineage between 1898 and 1997. It traces changes over time in emotional expression and identity formation within these sources. This research argues that the Tang lineage did not display a single or consistent identity between 1898 and 1997. Instead, across different phases of colonial governance, it articulated a composite form of identification, including “Chineseness,” “Britishness,” “local Hong Kong identity,” and “lineage identity.” In doing so, this research extends the analytical framework for examining Tang lineage identity under colonial rule and moves beyond the “resistance versus collaboration” paradigm that historiographical analyses of relations between the colonial authorities and Hong Kong’s Chinese communities.

Shirui ZHANG (she/her) is a recent MSc graduate from the University of Edinburgh. She will be starting her PhD at University of Bristol, continuing her work at the intersection of colonial history, identity, and memory. Her academic interests centre on colonial governance, identity construction, and historical memory in modern Hong Kong and South China. She is particularly drawn to the ways local lineage communities negotiated their identities under colonial rule, navigating between colonial authority, ancestral traditions, and shifting social landscapes. Her current research focuses on the Tang lineage in the New Territories of Hong Kong, bringing together archival analysis and Digital Humanities methods to examine how this lineage constructed and negotiated its identity over time. Through this work, she seeks to recover voices and practices often overlooked in conventional historical narratives.

Sherin JU, University of Hong Kong

Institutional Platform and Financial Practice: HSBC and Hong Kong’s Role as an Inter-Imperial Financial Intermediary (1929–1935)

This study examines how Hong Kong established and maintained its cross-regional financial intermediary status between 1929 and 1935. Unlike existing studies that mainly explain the formation path of Hong Kong’s financial centre in the post-war period, this paper focuses on the specific operational aspects of banks, exploring how banks transformed institutional conditions into operational advantage.

This study takes the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) as the core case study, arguing that the financial intermediary role in Hong Kong is not merely a natural outcome of the colonial system or market opening, but lies in the ability of banks to transform currency differences and silver fluctuations into sustainable operating mechanisms within the existing legal, monetary, and regulatory framework. In an environment where the gold standard and silver standard coexisted, and regional exchange rates fluctuated continuously, HSBC incorporated the unstable price relationships into daily operations through position adjustments and trade financing management, enabling cross-regional financial activities to continue operating.

Using Hong Kong Blue Book and Government Gazette, HSBC annual reports, as well as relevant market materials between London, Hong Kong, and coastal ports in China, this paper reconstructs how banks organised cross-regional capital flows and incorporated different currency systems into a unified financial framework. It argues that Hong Kong’s ability to become a cross-imperial financial intermediary during the interwar period was due to how the institutional platform was utilised by banks and transformed into operational and sustainable financial practices. In other words, financial capabilities are the result of being organised through the daily operations of banks on the institutional platform.
By focusing on HSBC, this study aims to provide a more specific explanation of how the colonial financial system maintained cross-border connections in the face of regional currency instability and offers an interwar perspective for understanding the historical formation of modern international financial centres.

Peishan JU (she/her) is a master’s student in Hong Kong History at the University of Hong Kong, whose research situates Hong Kong within the broader framework of imperial and transnational financial history. Her current dissertation, Hong Kong as a Financial Intermediary: Banking Practices in the Interwar Period, develops the concept of an “inter-imperial financial space” to explain how colonial legal and monetary institutions enabled routine financial intermediation across different currency regimes. Methodologically, her research combines archival materials, banking records, and quantitative evidence to bridge macro-level institutional analysis with micro-level financial operations. In parallel, she has contributed to interdisciplinary research in organisational behaviour and economic history, including projects employing panel data analysis, NLP, and GIS methods. Her broader research interests include colonial governance, monetary regimes, and the comparative study of financial systems across imperial contexts.

Panel 5A
Cosmopolitan Modernity, Chinese Republicanism

10:45–12:15
2.58, Central Podiums Level

Chair:
Jiayin WAN
University of Hong Kong

Lingshu LIU, University of Alberta

Translating the Divine, Picturing the Glocal: Chinese Christian Posters as Transcultural Archives

This paper investigates China’s interaction with the world by examining Chinese Christian posters and individuals involved in producing them in the early 20th century, a period of vigorous global circulation of technologies, ideas, and money.

By positioning Chinese Christian posters as an alternative archive, this paper analyses how Christian imagery circulated and was transformed in China—illustrating a particular case of transcultural visual transmission. How did posters visualise and integrate Christian teachings into China’s navigation in the modern world? Why did people engage in the production of posters in China? And how did Chinese Christian posters reflect the global transfer of knowledge through visual means? This paper argues that imagery was translatable and that Chinese Christian posters exemplified the Chinese aspect of the glocalised creation of visual knowledge. While retaining core Christian messages, Christian images underwent flexible adaptation to the specific Chinese context.

The intersection of material history, world Christianity, and transnational history contextualises posters into international religious and cultural politics. Posters were active history-makers. To persuade Chinese viewers, Chinese Christian posters constructed a safe and joyful Christian China against a dangerous and dark non-Christian China. These depictions adopted the Protestant antithetical imagery to promise viewers a stable China, highlighting Christianity as a solution to modern turbulence. Posters also recorded history absent from texts. Chinese Christian posters evidenced a global network of material and intellectual exchanges linking Chinese and foreign Christians. Sharing the commitment to transnational dissemination, Christians inside and outside China collaborated to share pictures, creatively adapt pictures to China’s needs, and provide funds and designs to reproduce pictures.

Addressing the scholarly gap in visual elements in cross-cultural publishing, this paper reveals the transnational flow of images and funds and sheds new light on the global transfer, co-production, and reinterpretation of knowledge, indicating the interconnectedness of Chinese history with world history.

Lingshu LIU (she/her) got her bachelor’s degree in Religious Studies from Minzu University of China, her Master of Theological Studies from Boston University, and her Master of Arts from the University of Washington. She has a broad interest in the history of Christianity in East Asia, illustrated prints, and the role of images in conveying information. Her doctoral project analyses the production, circulation, and use of Chinese Christian posters printed in China in the 20th century. From a transnational and material history perspective, she explores the global trend of visual evangelism and the network behind the use of Christian imagery in East Asia.

Yuehan DAI, Hong Kong Baptist University

Seeing the Frontier: Technology, Geopolitics, and Gender in the Visual Making of Yunnan (1880–1949)

In an era of rising nationalism, understanding how collective identities were historically constructed is more critical than ever. This paper examines the visual history of Southwest China’s frontier from the late Qing to the Republican period (1880–1949), a pivotal contact zone where diplomats, scientists, and Chinese ethnologists sought to explore, study, and govern. I thread these cases together by tracing how changes in photographic technology co-evolved with shifting geopolitical projects and gendered field practices, reshaping what could be seen, where, and by whom.

Rather than a simple Chinese–Western comparison, I read three bodies of work as a temporal-technical arc: the French diplomat Auguste François (1857-1935) operating heavy equipment within Indochina’s consular networks; the American scientist Joseph Rock (1884-1962) working with increasingly portable cameras tied to U.S. scientific and media circuits; and Academia Sinica ethnologists Ruey Yih-fu (1899-1991), Ling Shun-sheng (1901-1978) adopting standardized survey photography for nation-building. This progression moves from glass-plate formality to roll-film mobility and serial documentation. Methodologically, I combine close readings of photographs with photographers’ diaries and publication trails to show how material constraints and gendered norms shaped access and visibility.

The analysis demonstrates that photography was not a neutral recorder but an active force in constructing reality. As techniques and circulation changed, representation shifted—from posed, controlled scenes to more mobile views and ultimately standardised series—mapping onto contemporary geopolitics and a masculinised culture of fieldwork. Each gaze produced a different “Yunnan” and a different “ethnic subject,” showing how technology, political purpose, and gender set the terms of ethnic knowledge. Recovering this vertical thread clarifies how narratives of identity, borders, and ethnicity were materially and politically made—and why they remain so resonant today.

Yuehan DAI (she/her) is a PhD student in History at Hong Kong Baptist University and a Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme (HKPFS) awardee. Her work bridges archival research and curatorial practice to map the visual history of modern China. Her dissertation examines how early 20th-century photography produced—rather than merely reflected—knowledge of Southwest China by tracing the interplay of technological affordances, geopolitical agendas, and gendered institutional norms. Before her PhD, she was a Curatorial Assistant in the Research Department at the Tsinghua University Art Museum (TAM). She holds an MA in World History from Nanjing University and a BA in History from Beijing Normal University. She has received Digital Humanities workshop training at Princeton University and presented her project at the 2026 Association for Asian Studies (AAS) Annual Conference in Vancouver, Canada.

Frieda Yunyang LIU, Universität Leipzig

The Transformation of Incineration: The Evolution and State Requisition of Buddhist Cremation Spaces in Modern Wuhan (1912–1966)

Against the historical backdrop of long-standing imperial prohibitions on lay cremation, Buddhist incineration caves served as the near-exclusive legal and enduring infrastructure for cremation in pre-modern China. Following the transition to the Republican era, driven by the dual imperatives of embracing modernity and generating economic revenue, Buddhist monastics began opening these monastic facilities to the general public. As a pioneering city in the promotion of cremation, Wuhan saw its Buddhist institutions (notably Lianxi Temple 蓮溪寺, Gude Temple 古德寺, and Dafangguang Temple 大方廣講寺) substantively compensate for the deficiencies in municipal public services.

Following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, funeral services were reclassified as a form of “productive activity”; catalysing a vigorous movement to construct new crematoria within Buddhist temples. During this period, Buddhist-led cremation services accounted for nearly half of the city’s total volume. However, with the onset of Socialist Transformation, temple properties, including these crematoria, were progressively consolidated and requisitioned by the state. By the eve of the Cultural Revolution, the new government prohibited “superstitious activities”; such as sutra chanting and the hoisting of prayer banners, thereby systematically excising religion from the regulatory discourse of mortality.

By examining the case of Wuhan, this study argues that the modernisation of cremation was a deeply indigenous and continuous process, rather than a mere byproduct of Westernised modernity or unilateral state coercion. In this narrative, indigenous Buddhism did not act as a simple obstacle to modernisation; nor was funeral reform a mere outcome of materialism or scientism. Instead, across successive regimes, religion and politics co-produced the evolution of funerary practices in modern China.

Frieda Yunyang LIU (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the Institute of East Asian Studies at Universität Leipzig (Germany). She received her master’s degree in history from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and bachelor’s degree in Chinese language and literature from Nankai University. Before joining Universität Leipzig, she worked as an academic editor at Joint Publishing Company in Hong Kong for three years. Yunyang is currently preparing for her PhD thesis, with the expected topic being: Buddhist and Buddhicized Funerals in the Chinese Republican Era and the Early Stage of the People’s Republic (1911–1966). She is particularly interested in China’s transition from burial to cremation and the political involvement of Buddhists in this process. Yunyang’s other research interests include: gender equality in Buddhism, Buddhist marriage customs, religious integration, and Buddhism in Hong Kong.

Panel 5B
Lest We Forget — Memories of War and Violence

10:45–12:15
2.42, Central Podiums Level

Chair:
Jingqi SU
University of Hong Kong

Jan KUTÍLEK, University of Pardubice

Sexualised Violence and Community Destruction In and Beyond Post-Habsburg Galicia, 1918–1920

This paper examines sexualised violence perpetrated by Polish military units against Jewish communities in Galicia and broader Polish-controlled territories during 1918–1920. These forces operated as semi-autonomous paramilitary formations with weak central command, acting mainly in contested borderlands where institutional oversight had collapsed. Drawing on archival collections preserved in Poland, Ukraine, Israel, and the United States—including testimonies, materials produced by international investigative commissions, documentation compiled by Jewish members of the Polish Parliament, and contemporary reports—this study reconstructs patterns of sexual assault, forced nudity, and public humiliation.

The analysis identifies recurring practices across multiple locations: soldiers explicitly articulating sexual violence as an earned reward for military service, forcing family members to witness assaults, and monetising abuse through extortion. These shared practices emerged without central coordination. They show that sexual violence was driven by shared cultural codes rather than official policy.

The paper demonstrates how this violence functioned strategically to destroy Jewish community structures: emasculating men who were unable to protect their families, marking women as unmarriageable within traditional frameworks, and attacking the biological and cultural reproduction of Jewish communities. Methodologically, the research addresses challenges of working with euphemistic sources where sexual violence appears only as “outrages” or “dishonouring,” requiring careful interpretation of fragmentary testimonies and silences. By centring victims’ experiences and interrogating the mechanisms of silence that rendered sexualised violence largely invisible in the historical record, this study exposes the sexualised logics of ethnic domination during nation-state formation in post-imperial East-Central Europe.

Jan KUTÍLEK (he/him) is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Historical Sciences, University of Pardubice, and an archivist at the Archives of the Office of the President of the Czech Republic in Prague. His research focuses on antisemitism and post-imperial violence in East-Central Europe, with a particular attention to state collapse and social violence in the years following World War I. His doctoral dissertation examines anti-Jewish violence in Galicia in comparative perspective, 1918–1920. His recent publications include work on the November 1918 pogrom in Lviv (today’s Ukraine), and on anomie and anti-Jewish violence across Galicia and the Czech Lands during the post-imperial transition.

Alison CHOI, Northwestern University

Labour and Protest: Korean Prisoners-of-War in Honouliuli Camp during World War II

Over the course of four days in February 1945, more than six hundred Korean prisoners-of-war (POWs) went on strike in Honouliuli Camp on O‘ahu. Their reasoning and defense was unanimous: “the Prisoners of War stated that they would not go to work until their leaders and other fellow Korean Prisoners of War, who had been previously confined, were released from confinement.” Korean subjects undermined US military authority through withholding their most valuable tool: their labour. Amidst the chaos of war and the confines of imprisonment, Korean POWs acted in solidarity with their community of imprisoned labourers in Honouliuli, at the risk of punishment and retaliation by US military guards. What follows is a discussion of the history of Korean colonial and prison labour in the Pacific War and the circumstances of wartime incarceration for the protesting Korean POWs. I utilise materials from the National Archives to piece together how Korean subjects acted in accordance to their own agendas, thus defying US military control and disrupting the US military effort.

Alison CHOI (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Northwestern University. Her research examines Korean American and Korean diasporic histories, located within the emerging field of the Pacific World. Alison’s dissertation investigates the lives of Korean prisoners-of-war imprisoned in Hawai‘i by the US military during World War II. She examines the intertwined histories of Native Hawaiians and diasporic Korean prisoners during World War II, alongside a structural analysis of the unprecedented imperial violence of the Japanese and US empires in the Pacific during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Outside of her research, Alison volunteers for GYOPO, a Korean diasporic arts organisation based in Los Angeles that organises free educational and cultural programming in the LA area. In addition, she is a 200-hour certified vinyasa yoga instructor and teaches in both Chicago and Evanston!

Michael Kosei DELPHIA, Yenching Academy of Peking University

Memorialising Manchukuo: The Manmōen and Imperial Memory in Post-War Japan

In September 1931, the Japanese Kwantung Army invaded and occupied Northeast China, establishing the puppet state of Manchukuo (Wei Manzhouguo) in 1932. The Manchukuo state proclaimed ideals of ethnic harmony and moral governance that were incongruent with the violent, imperialist realities on the ground, including rural colonisation by hundreds of thousands of Japanese agricultural colonists. However, the 1945 Soviet invasion of Manchukuo and Japan’s defeat in World War II began a process of forced repatriation in which colonists returned to Japan. Repatriation was a long and often deadly process, while economic hardship awaited many returnees in Japan. Scholars in the English-speaking world have analysed repatriate memoirs and media to understand historical memory of Manchukuo, a contentious topic in contemporary East Asia. Yet the agricultural settler was not the only type of repatriate, as many members of the Manchukuo elite, such as bureaucrats and military officials, returned to Japan after defeat. Scholars in Japan have pointed out elite repatriates’ roles in constructing an apologist history of Manchukuo.

Building on this scholarship, I analyse the publications and works of one organisation, the Manchurian-Mongolian Compatriots Support Association, or Manmōen, to elucidate the contributions of former Manchukuo elites to post-war memory. From the 1950s into the 1970s, the Manmōen embarked on historical research projects, compiling and publishing histories of Manchukuo and repatriation. These narratives were neither the common repatriate narratives of unwitting colonial participation and subsequent betrayal, nor state narratives that minimised continuities between empire and the post-war Japanese state. Rather, they emphasised the role of empire and ideology, a project that eventually drew the attention of Japanese academics who sought to counter imperial apologia. The Manmōen thus not only contributed to the post-war memorialisation of Japan’s empire, but also inadvertently promoted the growth of academic studies of Manchukuo in Japan and beyond.

Michael (Mikey) Kosei DELPHIA (he/him) is a first-year master’s student at the Yenching Academy of Peking University, studying China Studies with a concentration in History and Archaeology. Growing up in a mixed Japanese and American household in the state of Michigan in the United States, he became interested in Japanese history in his youth, an interest that later converged with an interest in the Chinese language. At the University of Michigan, Michael began his research of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in 1930s and 1940s Northeast China, resulting in an honors thesis analysing the role of ethnic Koreans in the Concordia Association, the primary mass political organisation within Manchukuo society. Michael intends to continue this research into the Concordia Association at Peking University, and to pursue doctoral studies in the future with a focus on Japanese imperialism in Northeast Asia and inter-ethnic relations within the empire. Michael’s research interests also include sports and food histories of East Asia, especially in relation to colonialism. When not reading about Manchukuo, Michael enjoys exploring the old alleyways of Beijing, taking pictures on his film camera, going to the gym, and losing to his friends in table tennis.

Panel 6A
Surviving the Winter: Medical and Technological Exchanges in Cold War East Asia

2:00–3:30
2.58, Central Podiums Level

Chair:
Iris Boyun LEI
University of Hong Kong

Jingqi SU, University of Hong Kong

The Chinese Red Cross and Medical Training during the Korean War, 1950–1953

Established in 1904, the Chinese Red Cross (CRC) was reorganised by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1950. The CRC then conducted medical training programmes on the home front. This paper argues that during the Korean War, short-term and part-time medical training became a crucial mechanism for integrating the CRC into the new regime.

Drawing on archives, newspapers, and Red Cross publications, the paper demonstrates that the CRC’s medical training contributed to wartime emergency preparedness and mobilisation. First aid training became the major form of the CRC's medical training in support of the Movement to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea. It gave the CRC a new role by preparing civilians for potential air raids. It also enabled the CRC to establish connections with other institutions through first aid networks. Meanwhile, the CRC conducted hygiene training programmes. By mobilising civilians, this training complemented the wider health campaign and propaganda work during the Korean War, thereby showing the CRC’s auxiliary role within the new regime.

Through this process, the CRC’s medical training was transformed into a patriotic form of service, contributing to the organisation’s integration into the state. The paper reframes the Korean War as a decisive moment when medical training became a practical means through which the CCP incorporated the CRC into the new regime. It also suggests that this wartime transformation laid an important foundation for the further development of the CRC’s medical training in the years that followed.

Jingqi SU (he/him) is a PhD student in transnational history at the Department of History, the University of Hong Kong. He is broadly interested in the history of international organisations in 20th-century China, currently with a specific focus on the International Red Cross Movement and medical training in Communist China. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in History with a second major in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In his college years, he studied the transnational community of secretaries in the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in mid-20th-century China. He also conducted research at National Taiwan University and worked at Tsinghua University in Beijing before entering graduate school.

Jaeyoung HA, Tsinghua University

“A Good Tree is a Fast-Growing Tree”: South Korea’s Reforestation in the 1950s and the Making of Cold War Ecology in East Asia

This paper argues that early reforestation in post-war South Korea was part of a U.S.-led engineering of East Asian forest ecology, which aimed to turn Southeast Asian tropical forests into a timber reserve for Northeast Asia to protect its vulnerable forests. Focusing on the 1950s—a decade typically overshadowed by the authoritarian tree-planting campaigns of the Park Chung Hee era, this paper highlights transpacific and grassroots dimensions of forest management in South Korea. In so doing, this paper argues that these multi-faceted efforts were aimed at “protecting” its forests projected to disappear in twenty years by American foresters.

At the national level, this paper showcases that American and South Korean foresters sought to design what they called “preservation forestry,” centred on monocultured forests composed of a few fast-growing species—such as Pinus rigida, black locust, and Manchurian alder—cultivated by local farmers en masse. Namely, these forests were designed to be sustained through artificial management that relied heavily on peasant labour. I particularly emphasise how South Korea’s Village Forestry Associations (VFAs), originally a colonial institution, became the key actor in mobilising peasant labor through a mix of incentives and education. Beyond South Korea, this paper highlights that this shift was part of a broader U.S. strategy of “green imperialism,” which aimed to stabilise Northeast Asian agriculture while turning Southeast Asian forests into commercial timber reserves. While U.S. advisors celebrated the VFAs as examples of grassroots democracy, this paper argues that the resulting reforestation was less a democratic achievement but the making of an artificial ecosystem sustained by U.S. funding, peasant labor, and exploitation of Southeast Asian rainforests. In this way, I reframe South Korea’s reforestation history in the light of the U.S. engineering of Cold War landscapes in East Asia.

Jaeyoung HA (he/him) is a Shuimu postdoctoral scholar at Tsinghua University, Beijing. Ha graduated from the Department of History at University of California, San Diego in 2024, and before then he was a Fulbright student and a fellow at Seoul National University. His articles have been published in or approved by multiple journals including Diplomatic History and Environmental History, and cited by Time Magazine. He is currently working on his first book project on South Korea’s mountain frontier and second project on the formation of what he calls “East Asia’s energy archipelago.”

Linquan MA, King’s College London–University of Hong Kong

Staged Encounters: Visiting Experts and the Politics of Medical Exchange in Cold War China, 1949–1966

This paper examines the role of visiting medical experts, particularly in the field of tropical medicine, in early communist China within the broader context of the global Cold War. It argues that while socialist state-building and geopolitical tensions profoundly reshaped the forms of international scientific exchange, they did not eliminate earlier modes of knowledge circulation. Instead, encounters with foreign experts produced a hybrid model of exchange in which political performance and scientific practice coexisted, reconfiguring rather than displacing pre-communist patterns.

Before 1949, medical expertise in China developed through dense international networks linking foreign-trained specialists, missionary institutions, and overseas collaborators. After the founding of the PRC, these networks were disrupted, and international exchange became increasingly mediated by the state and framed by Cold War alignments. Visits were predominantly conducted by experts from socialist countries and were often carefully staged as diplomatic events, prioritising symbolic displays of solidarity and national achievement over substantive scholarly interaction.

Drawing on archival materials, institutional reports, expert memoirs, and contemporaneous medical publications, this paper focuses on three cases: the reception of socialist experts, the training of a Polish physician in parasitic disease control, and the 1956 collaboration between Chinese and Japanese schistosomiasis specialists. These cases demonstrate that, despite highly constrained and uneven conditions, knowledge continued to circulate through asymmetrical training, fieldwork, and, in rare instances, collaborative research. The Japanese case, in particular, reveals how scientific exchange across Cold War divides remained possible under complex conditions of political acceptability, shaped not only by China but also by the governments of Japan and the United States. Taken together, these examples call for a reassessment of science–politics relations in Cold War China: rather than narratives of domination or isolation, medical exchange was reconstructed into politically mediated yet functionally persistent forms.

Linquan MA (he/him) is currently a PhD candidate in History at the University of Hong Kong and King’s College London (Joint PhD programme). His doctoral research looks at the (re)making of tropical medicine expertise in communist China when the country faced tropical disease threats in the post-1949 period. Before joining HKU and KCL, he obtained an MPhil in World History at the University of Cambridge and a BA in Modern History and Politics at the University of Essex. He has presented his works at the HKU Spring History Symposium and KCL Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHoSTM) Research Hub Seminar in 2025, as well as at the Joint East Asian Studies Conference at Central Lancashire University in 2024.

Panel 6B
Mapping A Nation, One Frontier To Another

2:00–3:30
2.42, Central Podiums Level

Chair:
Alicia LE
University of Hong Kong

Ziang DONG, Hokkaido University

Voices from the Historical Margins: Ethnicity, Nation, and Identity in Ainu Periodicals (1910–1948)

Since the mid-Meiji period, when the Japanese government officially renamed Ezo (蝦夷地) as “Hokkaido” (北海道), the region was gradually incorporated into the political and narrative framework of the Japanese Empire through a process often described as “internal colonialism.” Despite changes in ideological language before and after 1945, Japanese national narratives consistently relegated the Ainu to a position of structural marginality.

This study seeks to recover and critically examine Ainu historical narratives by analysing periodicals founded and led by Ainu intellectuals in the first half of the 20th century. Rather than being merely subordinate to state narratives, these Ainu voices alternately resonated with and contested dominant national discourses across different historical moments. With the transition from Meiji to the Taishō and Shōwa periods, what kinds of historical voices did the Ainu articulate beyond the emperor-centred national chronology?

The study therefore examines seven Ainu periodicals: Ryōyū (良友, 1910–1911), Utarigusu (ウタリグス, 1920–1925), Ezo no Hikari (蝦夷の光, 1930–1931), Utari no Hikari (ウタリ乃光り, 1932–1935), Utari no Tomo (ウタリ之友, 1933), Ainu Shinbun (アイヌ新聞, 1946–1947), and Kita no Hikari (北の光, 1948). It explores how the myth of Japan as a monoethnic nation exerted pressure on Ainu society, how linguistic loss compelled Ainu intellectuals to narrate themselves primarily in Japanese, and how Ainu identity was continuously produced and transformed from the modern period through the post-war era.

By foregrounding Ainu perspectives, this study demonstrates how Japanese national myth-making, linguistic erosion, and reliance on Japanese discursive spaces shaped historical trauma and contemporary Ainu identity.

Ziang DONG (he/him) received his PhD in International Media and Communication from Hokkaido University, where he is currently an Assistant Professor at Research Faculty of Media and Communication. His research interests include media studies, historical sociology, and regional studies, with a particular focus on the histories of so-called “peripheral” regions and the intersections of media, religion, and social thought. He is currently engaged in a project that explores religion, ethnicity, and modernisation in highland societies of Yunnan (China), focusing on the activities and archival records of the Paris Foreign Missions (MEP).

Huimin MIAO, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Strategic Orthodoxy and Frontier Integration: Textbook Politics, Sovereignty, and Nation-Building in Alxa, Inner Mongolia, Republican China (1927–1945)

How do frontier societies respond to nation-building processes when political authority is fragmented but national sovereignty remains formally intact? Existing scholarship has often interpreted education in modern China’s frontier and occupied regions either as an instrument of state penetration or as a form of cultural resistance. This article reconsiders this dichotomy through a comparative study of textbook politics. Focusing on Mongolian–Chinese bilingual textbooks compiled in Alxa Banner, Inner Mongolia (1927–1945), and comparing them with history textbooks revised under the Japanese-sponsored North China regime, the article examines why identical centrally authorised curricular models evolved differently under distinct sovereignty structures. In Japanese-controlled regions, textbooks underwent repeated ideological revisions and gradually incorporated the discourse of the “New East Asian Order.” In contrast, despite the imprisonment of the local prince and growing intervention by regional warlord authorities, Alxa’s educational institutions continued to adopt and faithfully translate centrally approved textbooks.

Based on archival evidence and textual comparison, the article argues that such continuity was not merely the result of institutional limitation. Rather, where sovereignty remained formally unbroken, adherence to national orthodoxy functioned as a strategic political choice through which local elites affirmed political belonging and resisted competing regional powers. The article proposes the concept of Strategic Orthodoxy, suggesting that textbooks operate not only as instruments of ideological transmission but also as indicators of sovereignty structures. The comparison demonstrates that frontier integration could be achieved through disciplined alignment with state orthodoxy rather than ideological transformation. In this sense, the key issue of national integration may not lie in the expansion of state power to the periphery, but rather in the sovereign order under which local societies choose to continue to recognise the state itself.

MIAO Huimin (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Chinese History and Culture at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests include modern Chinese history, ethnic relations, nationalism, memory politics, nation-building, the history of education, and Digital Humanities. Her doctoral dissertation, Modernization, Nation-Building, and Political Contestation: Mongolian Education and Why Inner Mongolia Became Part of China (1912–1949), examines the modernisation of education in Inner Mongolia during the Republican period. The study focuses on how education policies aimed at national integration were formulated and implemented, and how they were shaped by tensions between the central state and local authorities, as well as by competition among political parties. The dissertation is organised around four analytical perspectives—the central government, Eastern Mongolia, Western Mongolia, and the Chinese Communist Party—and compares Mongolian education under different political regimes to explore the tensions between unification-oriented nationalism and more plural visions of nationhood. The research draws on a wide range of sources, including archival materials from multiple cities, as well as published historical works, memoirs, newspapers and periodicals, and rare bilingual Mongolian–Chinese textbooks.

Colin LAM, Chinese University of Hong Kong

Busy October: National Day(s), Public Space and Chinese Associations in Portuguese Macau

October was a busy month for everyone in Macau during the 1950s and 1960s. As the National Day of the People’s Republic of China (1 October) is only nine days before the National Day of the Republic of China (10 October), both the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Kuomintang (KMT) considered the celebration a battle of propaganda and mobilisation. Celebration events, led by Chinese local associations, were typically all week long, including a gala and building decorated archways. For instance, the archways represented the most public battleground between the KMT and the CCP. Thus, both parties had to renew a more impressive one each year.

This paper examines the transformation of National Day celebrations by both the CCP and the KMT in Macau from the 1950s to the 1960s. By examining archival documents, newspapers in Chinese, English, and Portuguese, and photographs, this paper argues that the major difference between KMT and CCP National Day celebrations lies in the roles of public spaces. In Macau, public space was necessary for celebration events organised by KMT parties. In contrast, CCP organisations in Macau had their own private event venues to celebrate, which rendered public space unnecessary. In this sense, the Portuguese colonial authorities were not able to monitor CCP’s activities, even before the 12-3 incident. More broadly, the KMT had lost ground, and the Portuguese government had abandoned its traditional neutrality before the 12-3 Incident. Existing scholarship highlights that the 12-3 Incident was a major turning point in the relationship between the KMT and Portuguese Macau. However, this case of public space suggests the need to reconsider the actual influence of the 12-3 Incident on the Portuguese stance towards both the KMT and the CCP.

Colin Hoi Sing LAM (he/him) is an MPhil student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he earned his BA in History. His research interests lie in urban history, social history, and Digital Humanities. He is currently researching the comparative history of public spaces in British Hong Kong and Portuguese Macau.

Panel 7
Within Recent Memories: Historical Research in the Contemporary Moment

3:45–5:15
2.58, Central Podiums Level

Chair:
Hedda LEE
University of Hong Kong

Bingyi GONG, Chongqing University

Capitalist Computer Exports to China and the Transformation of the Cold War in East Asia

This research examines how sensitive technologies travelled across political divides during the late Cold War and how their circulation reshaped both global trade and international relations. Focusing on multilateral negotiations over computer exports between China and capitalist countries from the late 1960s to 1980, it treats technology not simply as an object of control, but as a mobile form of knowledge whose movement required complex institutional, political, and commercial mediation. Drawing on archival sources from Japan, the United States, China, Britain, and France, the research analyses how capitalist countries coordinated, competed, and negotiated within a multilateral export control regime to regulate the transfer of dual-use technologies, including high-performance computers. These negotiations reveal that the “transport” of technology was never merely logistical or economic; it depended on shared assessments of security, trust, and political risk. Sensitive technologies thus circulated only when countries could align commercial incentives with strategic reassurance, turning export controls into instruments that could both restrict and enable cross-border exchange.

By tracing how high-performance computers were selectively permitted to move across ideological boundaries, this research shows that sensitive technology functioned not only as a source of geopolitical tension but also as a medium of interaction that linked previously antagonistic systems. The circulation of technology contributed to the erosion of rigid economic blocs, the expansion of global trade networks, and the emergence of new forms of multilateral coordination. More broadly, the research contributes to the transportation history of knowledge and technology by demonstrating that the global movement of sensitive technologies depended less on technical feasibility than on political negotiation and institutional design. It highlights how regimes governing mobility—rather than technologies themselves—shaped the pathways through which knowledge and machines crossed borders and transformed global order.

Bingyi GONG (she/her) is a lecturer at the School of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Chongqing University. She earned her PhD in international public policy from Osaka University in 2024. Bingyi Gong studies the history of China-capitalist bloc relations in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly from the perspective of export controls and technology transfer. Her articles have appeared in Cold War History, Journal of Global History, and Journal of Contemporary History. She is currently working on the project “The U.S. and Japanese Export Policies of High-performance Computers toward China (1978-1992).”

Peilin LI, University of Leicester

Learning the Market: Values, Moral Reasoning, and Social Change in Reform-Era China

This paper reconsiders the origins of medical marketisation in post-Mao China by shifting attention from policy change alone to the broader transformation of social values and professional subjectivities during the Reform era. Drawing on oral history interviews with doctors, hospital administrators, and pharmaceutical sales representatives who worked in China’s public healthcare system between the 1980s and 1990s, it argues that marketisation emerged not simply as a response to new policies, but as part of a wider reorientation of social norms, economic expectations, and moral reasoning under Reform and Opening.

Although central government policies from the opening and reform, most notably the introduction of budgetary contracting in 1985, permitted hospitals to pursue revenue generation, oral testimonies suggest that the widespread adoption of profit-oriented practices such as over-prescription, bonus linked performance, and close collaboration with pharmaceutical firms occurred mainly in the early to mid-1990s. This temporal lag cannot be fully explained by policy design alone. Instead, interviewees consistently situate their decisions within a rapidly changing social environment in which fixed professional salaries fell behind rising market incomes, and monetary success became an increasingly dominant measure of social status. For many doctors, pursuing additional income was not experienced as a moral transgression but as a rational adaptation to new market rules and social expectations. Medical practice thus became a site where Reform-era values were actively negotiated and internalised. By foregrounding doctors’ subjective experiences and moral reasoning, this paper reframes medical marketisation as a historically contingent process shaped by the interaction between state retreat, institutional funding structures, and shifting social values. In doing so, it offers a social and cultural history of Reform-era healthcare that helps explain how the conditions for what later came to be labelled “medical corruption” gradually took form.

Peilin LI (he/him) is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Leicester; his PhD thesis focuses on Japanese imperialism through the relationship between social organisation and government in Tianjin from 1928 to 1945. His recent interest focuses on the medical reform in 1980-2000 mainland China. He has also been involved in teaching and research assistant roles, including serving as a Teaching Assistant for "Making History" at the University of Leicester and contributing to a National Social Science Fund of China programme about English Translation, Dissemination and Reception of the Book of Psalms.

CHAN Yu Kiu Zita, University of Hong

To Unite the City through Television: Exploring Hong Kong Cultural Changes In the Case of Enjoy Yourself Tonight

This project investigates Enjoy Yourself Tonight (EYT), Hong Kong’s longest-running television variety show (1967–1994), as a case study of cultural change and identity formation in the post-1967 riots era. Produced by TVB as the city’s first colour television programme, EYT quickly became a nightly ritual for families and friends, and its popularity raises important questions about television’s role in shaping Hong Kong’s social cohesion and local identity. I will examine how EYT functioned both as entertainment and as a medium for colonial messaging—such as metrication campaigns—and whether it operated as a tool of propaganda and being influential to the society as a whole.

Methodologically, the project combines archival research, programme analysis, and oral history. I will consult government records and materials in the Public Records Office to examine possible state involvement in television production, while analysing EYT’s content to assess how performances mirrored contemporary social values. Oral interviews with producer Robert Chua will provide insights into both production decisions and audience reception. Newspapers and entertainment news will further illuminate how EYT nurtured stardom and contributed to the rise of Cantopop and Cantonese popular culture with Cantonese-centric performances.

By situating EYT within broader debates on Hong Kong identity, late colonial cultural policy, and Asian media history, this study aims to highlight television as an overlooked but powerful medium of intangible heritage. Ultimately, I propose that EYT acted as a microcosm of Hong Kong society: a contested space where colonial governance, commercial imperatives, and vernacular creativity converged, leaving a legacy of shared nostalgia and cultural solidarity that continues to resonate today.

CHAN Yu Kiu (she/her) is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in the field of Hong Kong History at The University of Hong Kong. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Studies from City University of Hong Kong, where she minored in Business Law. Her scholarly interests focus on Hong Kong history and the dissemination of historical knowledge through public media. As a news anchor and reporter at Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB) since June 2022, she has honed skills in live broadcasting and audience engagement. Notably, she hosted the history feature programme 探古尋源 Historical Hong Kong, which explores Hong Kong’s historical narratives, and served as editor for the flagship programme 新聞掏寶 News Treasury, both deepening her engagement with local historical content. Fluent in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin, her interdisciplinary background equips her to present historical research accessibly to diverse audiences.

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

Thursday, 7 May

Friday, 8 May

DAY 1

7 MAY 2026

Opening Remarks

9:00–9:15 2.58, Central Podiums Level

David POMFRET, University of Hong Kong

Keynote Sino-Southeast Asia’s Blue-Water Embrace: A Millennial Horizon, 600-1600 CE

Eric TAGLIACOZZO Cornell University

9:15–10:45 2.58, Central Podiums Level

Discussant: Devika SHANKAR University of Hong Kong

Panel 1 East-West Exchanges in the Early Modern World

11:00–12:30 2.58, Central Podiums Level

Chair: FANG Yi University of Hong Kong

Tommaso PEPE, University of International Business and Economics, Beijing

Massimo BOMBONI, Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, Torino

Diki SHERPA, Ashoka University

Panel 2A Knowledge Production in the Making of East Asian Imperialism

14:00–15:30 2.58, Central Podiums Level

Chair: Linquan MA King's College London, University of Hong Kong

Yutao CHEN, Harvard University

Ran TAI, University of Groningen

Tianlin FU, University of Hong Kong

Panel 2B (Un)natural Sciences, Uncanny Journeys

14:00–15:30 CPD 2.42, Central Podiums Level

Chair: Rebecca Si-ning WANG, University of Hong Kong

Seongun PARK, Harvard University

YEW Ying Han, National University of Singapore

Victoria CHUNG, Oxford University

Panel 3 Rethinking Diaspora: Kinship and Belonging on the Margins

15:45–17:15 2.58, Central Podiums Level

Chair: Nicole VAUGHAN University of Hong Kong

You LAN, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Alicia LE, University of Hong Kong

Jieluan HUANG, King’s College London

DAY 2

8 MAY 2026

Panel 4 Hong Kong: Pearl of the Orient?

9:00–10:30 2.58, Central Podiums Level

Chair: CHENG Ho Lik Ron University of Hong Kong

Iris Boyun LEI, University of Hong Kong

Shirui ZHANG, University of Edinburgh

Sherin JU, University of Hong Kong

Panel 5A Cosmopolitan Modernity, Chinese Republicanism

10:45–12:15 2.58, Central Podiums Level

Chair: Jiayin WAN University of Hong Kong