Jinping Wang. In the Wake of the Mongols

Jinping Wang’s In the Wake of the Mongols: The Making of a New Social Order in North China, 1200–1600 opens our eyes to the potential of the historian to venture into the countryside in search of unpublished epigraphic sources. The inscriptional evidence that she discovered on steles in Shanxi Province contributes to an ambitious book seeking to investigate the development of rural society in north China over the course of four centuries. Her excursions into the field and into more conventional research in published compilations of inscriptions were necessary because relatively few provincial sources composed on paper are extant in Shanxi and elsewhere in north China from prior to the seventeenth century. Consequently, previous research on rural society in the period from 1200 to 1600 has focused on south China, where the more extensive documentary record has revealed an elite of Neo-Confucian literati who developed powerful lineages and dominated local society.

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · China · Chinese society · Elite · Extant taxon · Geography · Order (exchange) · Period (music) · Political science · Politics · Rural area · Rural society · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies