5/2 Workshop on Taiwan Studies in Transition: Sources, Theories, and Approaches
Ling-Wei Kung, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Revisiting Qing Campaign History of Conquering Taiwan
The so-called fanglue (campaign history) was an important genre of official historiography in the Qing Dynasty, mainly recording the major military campaigns. Most of the surviving copies of the fanglue from the Qing Dynasty are circulated in the form of printed editions, while the manuscript drafts from the compilation process are relatively rare. Hence, in terms of the history of Qing historiography, there is still significant room for research advancement by using the manuscript drafts of fanglue to explore their compilation process. After its conquest of the Koxinga regime in 1683, the Qing Dynasty compiled the fanglue concerning the military campaigns in Taiwan. Nevertheless, the campaign history of conquering Taiwan was never published and circulated during the Qing era. Fortunately, the archives of Grand Secretariat at the Institute of History and Philology contain the original Manchu and Chinese manuscripts of the campaign history. By the comparative studies of the Manchu and Chinese texts together with multilingual documents, this research aims to explore not only the nuanced historical events between the Koxinga and the Manchus but also how the Qing reconstructed the historical memories of Taiwan for different ethnic groups in the empire.
Dr Ling-Wei Kung is a historian of early modern/modern China and Inner Asia, with a focus on information, technology, and knowledge in international and comparative contexts. He received a B.A., summa cum laude in History from National Taiwan University (2012), and his M.A. (2015), M.Phil. (2018), and Ph.D. (2021) in History and East Asian Studies from Columbia University. His current book project, tentatively entitled “The Great Convergence: Information Circulation, International Trade, and Knowledge Transmission Between Early Modern China, Inner Asia, and Eurasia,” investigates the Eurasian integration of knowledge systems from Inner Asia, the middle ground between China, India, and Russia. Supplementing modern and classical Chinese sources with multilingual materials in Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchu, Japanese, Russian, and a range of European languages, his research goes beyond the limits of the metropole-periphery discourse by shedding light on the mobility, indigeneity, and transnationalism of Tibetan, Mongolian, and Uyghur societies in the making of the modern world.
