Northern Anhui, nestled along the Huai River, was the cradle of the Ming dynasty—the birthplace of Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang and his generals. In the early Ming, the region rose to become the empire's secondary capital, yet this status was to prove fleeting. Within decades, the brilliance had faded, giving way to centuries of poverty, calamity, and unrest.
Why did this "land of emperors" fall so calamitously? This talk traces the five‑hundred‑year rise and fall of imperial Northern Anhui to reveal the tangled, complex interactions between central power and local society in imperial China. We'll discuss the logic behind state governance, and piece together the everyday lives of its people to attempt to discover how the empire was ruled and how ordinary people survived.
Speakers
Ning Zheng
Associate Professor and Deputy Chair of the History Department at Shanghai Normal University
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Ning Zheng
Associate Professor and Deputy Chair of the History Department at Shanghai Normal University
Zheng Ning holds a Ph.D. in History from Fudan University and was a Visiting Fellow in the Department of East Asian Studies at Harvard. He is currently an Associate Professor and Deputy Chair of the History Department at Shanghai Normal University. His new book "Silent Northern Anhui : imperial governance and local society in the Ming and Qing Dynasties" was published this year.
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