Team 4 - The Zheng He Voyages

Zhongping Chen’s team is based at the University of Victoria. With his collaborators and students, Chen will examine how Zheng He’s early fifteenth-century voyages across the Indian Ocean were represented and also reinforced human-environmental interactions and long-distance exchange of people and objects in the vast region, especially in the Lower Yangzi area around present Shanghai and the Pearl River Delta around Canton (Guangzhou).

Chen’s research group will focus on three specific subjects:

1) How did human-environment interactions and subsequent economic development in the Lower Yangzi region provide a foundation for Zheng He’s voyages starting in this region and also benefit from the expansion of the long-distance trade thereafter?

2) How did Zheng He’s voyages reflect centuries of human efforts to understand and utilize environmental factors, such as monsoon winds, oceanic currents, astronomical phenomena, and so on for the development of nautical navigation and long-distance trade, including the tributary trade between imperial China and other countries around the Indian Ocean?

3) After Zheng He’s voyages, how did the tributary trade expand around the port city of Canton and intensify ecological change in the nearby Pearl River Delta and its long-distance exchange of people and objects with other Asian and African countries as well as trade with European commercial powers in the Indian Ocean world?

Latest Team Publications

TEAM LEADER

Zhongping Chen, University of Victoria

Zhongping Chen was born and grew up in China. He successively received his B.A. and M.A. from Nanjing University in 1982 and 1984, as well as his PhD from the University of Hawaii in 1998. In addition to his early teaching career at Nanjing Normal University, Chen has mainly taught courses and done research in the fields of Chinese history and the history of the global Chinese diaspora at McGill University, Trent University and the University of Victoria. His Chinese and English publications include three books and dozens of journal articles. His most recent publication is Modern China’s Network Revolution: Chambers of Commerce and Sociopolitical Change in the Early Twentieth Century (Stanford: CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).

COLLABORATORS

Gregory Blue, University of Victoria

Ying Liu, University of Victoria

Ying Liu is a Reference and Subject Liaison Librarian at the University of Victoria. She has an MA in Linguistics and was a college teacher in Shanghai, China, before immigrating to Canada in 2001. She worked as a Collection Development Librarian at the Dr. John Archer Library, University of Regina, from 2005 to 2008, and, in addition to publishing papers and research guides, maintains a blog on Pacific and Asian Studies for the University of Victoria's Libraries website.

Liu's main interests are Asian collections, bibliographic studies, patron services, international cooperation among libraries and library services for international students.

Lixing Tang, Shanghai Normal University

Professor Lixing Tang is a graduate from the History Department of Nanjing University, China. He is currently a professor of Chinese history in the History Department and the director of the Center for Studies of Modern Chinese Society at Shanghai Normal University, as well as the vice president of the Association of Chinese Social History. His major publications include Suzhou and Huizhou Areas: Regional Interrelations and Social Transformation: From the 16th to the 20th century (Beijing: Commercial Book Bureau, 2007); a bibliography of articles and books on the history of the Lower Yangzi Region (Beijing: Beijing Library Press, 2007, co-edited with Chen Zhongping et al.); Lineage and Society in Huizhou Area (Hefei: Anhui People’s Press, 2005); Merchants and Modern Chinese Society (Beijing: Commercial Book Bureau, 2003); Confucian Merchants and Local Society in the Lower Yangzi Region (Beijing: People’s Press, 2002).

STUDENTS

Sydney Cunliffe, University of Victoria

Jun Jie, Shanghai Normal University

Po Jin, Shanghai Normal University

Yen-Kuang Kuo, University of Victoria

Yen-Kuang Kuo received her MA in Pacific and Asian Studies, concentrating on Modern Chinese literature, from the University of Victoria, and is currently a PhD student in the Department of History, also at the University of Victoria. Her research interests include Modern Chinese history, Chinese diaspora, and the interrelation between literature and history. Currently, she is working on Chinese sources regarding Zheng He’s voyages across the Indian Ocean between 1405-1433.

PAST STUDENTS

Dennis Chen, University of Victoria

Liam O’Reilly, University of Victoria