May 25-26, 2023
Empire under the Night Sky: The Role of Fenye (Astrological Contents) in Late Imperial China
Fenye is an astral-terrestrial correspondence system that associates constellations (heaven) with regions (earth) based on the ancient Chinese cosmology of inseparable heaven, earth, and the human world. It first emerged during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (8th–3rd centuries BC) for political prognostication, then continued to develop throughout the long course from Han (202 BCE–220 CE) to Song (960–1279). Scholars believe that fenye gradually lost its political prognostication function after Song.
However, in the genre of local gazetteers that documented local information which emerged after Song and flourished in late imperial period, fenye somehow obtained a crucial status: not only 80% of those gazetteers have a dedicated section on fenye, but almost all of them start the gazetteer by identifying the place in the vast empire through its assorting lodges. We question why fenye, started as a divination system, became such an essential part of local gazetteers.
After the 17th century as western astronomy became popular in China, fenye was heavily criticized by literati for its imprecise and illogical correspondence. The 1781 public critics by the Qianlong emperor is considered by scholars a major sing of the fall of fenye. However, with quantitative analysis, we found many gazetteers still kept fenye afterwards. In this workshop, we bring together historians from different domains and time periods to together examine how fenye became a popular chapter in Chinese local gazetteers, how gazetteer compilers resisted removing fenye, and what eventually replaced fenye at the time of crisis—when Chinese knowledge systems were eventually torn down and replaced by western epistemologies from Imperial to Republican China.
You can find the program and further registration informations below.
Program
Contact and Registration
Registration is required for participation (Deadline: May 22, 2023), in person or online. Please note that there will be no presentations at the workshop, and we expect the audience to read the pre-circulated papers to engage in the discussion. Please send an email to event_dept3@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de with the subject of “[Registration] Role of fenye workshop”, and specify your name, position, current affiliation, and online or in person participation.