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Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Constructing a Water Town: The River, the Sea, and the Communities in Wenzhou

Water has shaped Chinese history. Yet, scholars have not thoroughly explored how water became an important space that shaped the life of many communities in the Chinese society. Delving into the case of Wenzhou, a southeast Chinese city with extensive water systems and rich experiences with rivers and oceans, this module examines the spatial history of water surrounding this city. As this module demonstrates, water in a city does not occur as merely a natural resource or a channel of transport; instead, it is a contested zone wherein a variety of actors negotiated local order, engaged in communal water politics, developed social organizations, and fostered cultural and religious life.

Wenzhou is located in the southeastern region of Zhejiang—around 200 miles south of Shanghai and near the northern border of the Fujian province. Facing the East China Sea and being at the periphery of the Western Pacific Ocean, Wenzhou had long served as a port for fisheries and coastal trade. Since the surrounding Yandang Mountains blocked Wenzhou’s land routes to the prosperous Jiangnan region and the southern provinces, the inhabitants of the city heavily relied on water routes in order to associate with the neighboring regions. The geographical location and the continued coastal trade turned Wenzhou into a major trade center in southeast China. In 1876, Wenzhou became a treaty port open to foreign countries and continued to develop its maritime trade and water transportation.

The coastal environment had significantly shaped Wenzhou’s economy and society. Trade, fisheries, and salt production remained the major economic activities along the coastal areas. Smuggling and piracy were common occurrences as traders hid in the surrounding waters and used the isles and the fishing villages as their bases. The mountainous isolation made it difficult for the state to deploy troops or extend its administrative reach to Wenzhou. Many pirates and smugglers thus continued to flourish around the seas, and had maintained wide connections with both local communities and the nearby regions, including Taizhou and Fujian. Yet, it was also because of such geographical features that many political regimes set up maritime defense infrastructures and made Wenzhou an important strategic region.

Against the same backdrop, the waters surrounding the city profoundly structured the daily life in Wenzhou. The inhabitants built seawalls and water gates to prevent flooding, especially during typhoons and rainy seasons. They also drew boundaries on the land along the seawalls, and competed for resources for cultivation and fishery. The three rivers that flowed from the western mountains to the eastern sea divided the city into several subordinate counties. Therefore, canals were built between rivers for irrigation and transportation purposes, forming an extensive water system—the Wenruitang River. The locals viewed this river as "the mother river of the Wenzhou people" because it nourished the lands of the Wenzhou Plain and connected the scattered regions through its canal channels. The density of water networks made Lucy Soothill (1857–1931), who served Methodist missionary in Wenzhou for nearly 25 years (1884–1907), call this city the “Venice of China.” Furthermore, due to sand accumulation and the emergence of new lands, the old seawalls along the coast gradually merged into the canals of the Wenruitang system. Such dynamic formation of canal system, as well as the accompanied demarcation of new lands amongst local communities, had become an integral part in the formation of the Wenzhou Plain. Thereby, as this module asserts, Wenzhou represents a distinctive example of a “water town” (shuixiang)—an urban settlement not only located in close proximity to a water body but also manifesting frequent interactions between water and local communities.

While water deeply influenced the life of local communities, it was also a site and implement for actors with varied interests and agendas to manipulate local politics and social relations. Villagers across the Wenzhou Plain used canals, seawalls, water gates, and bridges to mark the boundaries between different communities. The locals constantly relied on dragon boat rituals to set up cross-regional networks. The villages joined the ritual alliances to participate in communal affairs, and used dragon boat racing to compete with the other villages for social, political, and natural resources. Local cults were also developed around the waters, one such ritual is the “Send a Boat” practice wherein a boat is sent to the water with the belief that it would expel plague. All in all, the waters of Wenzhou have caused local communities to develop their distinctive cultures, and demonstrated the diverse experiences and contesting strategies belonging to different communities across the plain.

Consequently, this module contends that water in Wenzhou has constituted an important space and is a contested zone wherein regimes and local actors had constantly negotiated local order and socio-political relations. The water space in Wenzhou, which was vastly built on the water, was intertwined with ecological, social, and political structures of southeast China. It reveals how local people acted, perceived, and responded to the maneuvering of water and the associated matters. It also reflects upon the complex layers of experiences involving the water, including how actors from varied strata developed contesting strategies regarding the distribution of social, cultural, and political resources. Moreover, as this module argues, the water in Wenzhou has created a zone that is similar to what Mary Louise Pratt calls the “contact zone”—the “social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power.” This module further demonstrates, the competing powers and villages across the Wenzhou Plain had formed up an arena through constant adaptation and negotiation in which local actors manipulated the ways of approaching and dealing with waters.

This module explores four aspects of the spatial history of Wenzhou waters. First, it examines the evolution of the Wenruitang River. This water system contains natural streams originating from mountains and other main rivers. It also contains canals that were built after the accumulation of sand. Residents built these canals not only for irrigation, but also for boundary-making purposes. The abandoned seawalls now serve as markers between communities. Thus, the entire “tang” river system continued to expand, while communities consistently divided new lands based on economic and social deliberation. Drawing on the newly available archives and local sources, this module elaborates on, and maps, the development of the Wenruitang River during the modern era (circa 1800s–1950s), which includes the construction of seawalls, water gates, and canals. It also explores the political and economic causes behind each major change the river went through, with a focus on the interaction between the environment and local communities.

The second aspect focuses on festivals and rituals. While canals became an integral part of daily life in Wenzhou, they also served as an important site during festivals and entertainment time, including the famous dragon boat races and performances. Similar to many regions in China, Wenzhou celebrated the dragon boat festival in every county. Due to the fact that this tradition was deeply embedded in popular religions and local politics, local communities utilized this competition as a way to settle disputes and restructure their relationships with neighboring villages. Recent studies have demonstrated how the festival varies regionally in terms of rituals, deities, performances, and dates. Sources also reveal how local officials frequently banned dragon boat races because they caused fighting, injuries, and drowning. Focusing on the ways in which dragon boat practices were enforced, challenged, and manipulated, this examines the dynamics of festivals and rituals on Wenzhou’s waters.

The third aspect throws light on the ritual of “Send a Boat” and its connections with Wenzhou’s local religion and communities. Due to fear of the spreading pandemic, Wenzhou people developed local cults in order to expel plagues. Many communities created an array of plague-fighting rituals such as the one of burning and sending boats that represent demonic spirits in the water. Using both primary and secondary studies, this section explores how religious beliefs were practiced and negotiated in the water space. This module further examines the ways local communities perceived and imagined illness, spirits, and the environment of their religious practices around the waters.

The final section examines the life and characteristics of outlaws and their illegal activities on Wenzhou’s waters. Due to its strategic location and proximity to water, the Wenzhou society displays a high frequency of smuggling, piracy, and warfare. Communities along the coast developed varied strategies regarding the use of violence in illicit trade and local political struggles. Competing regimes also occasionally battled on Wenzhou’s waters in order to extract social, political, and economic resources. Drawing on abundant sources, this module explores how waters shaped Wenzhou’s endemic violence and how outlaws, in turn, structured the space of water and impacted Wenzhou’s politics and society.

[Cover photo]: Pagoda Island at Wenchow [Wenzhou] between 1878 and 1880. The original is held by the Harvard-Yenching Library of the Harvard College Library, Harvard University, in Edward Bangs Drew Collection. Many thanks to Harvard-Yenching Library, which kindly permits the use of image.

[ERC Acknowledgment]: This project received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 788476).

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Physical and Cultural Cartographies
Understanding the physical and cultural geographies of northern Vietnam is useful for our exploration of how invasions were mapped. Northern Vietnam's rivers, seas, hills, valleys, plateaus, and mountains played a role in the potential spread of disease vectors. This physical landscape also played a role in the spread of information through knowledge and social networks, as Maren Ehlers explores for smallpox vaccines in Tokugawa Japan.
Lê Bá Thảo (1923-2000), a medical student, Việt Minh partisan, and later famous geographer of Vietnam, has written that the Red River Delta is the result “of both the Red River and the Thái Bình river systems, but for reason of convenience and habit, the delta is named after the principal river system (the Red River)” (Lê 1997, 318).
In a recent “sketch” of the history of the Red River Delta, Li Tana explores the complex histories of the Red and Thai Binh river systems. Geological and archeological work suggests that erosion and sedimentation rates have been far from constant. For instance, from about 2000 to 1000 years before present, the northeastern delta expanded rapidly compared to the western delta. This era roughly corresponds to a period of incorporation of the delta into the Chinese empire along with expanded deforestation and increased economic activity. During the following 1000 years to the present, delta expansion has shifted to the southwestern delta. The changing names of the Red River signal some of this complexity. In fact, the name “Red River” only emerged recently during the nineteenth century, perhaps introduced by the French who noted the “red” color (due to a heavy sediment load) of the river (Li 2016).
Topological maps of the Red River delta resembling current visualization of the delta began to appear in the nineteenth century. The following commercial map published in Paris in 1886 shows several things. First, French knowledge of the Red River Delta was quite limited. French conquest of the Nguyen imperial court, and control over central and northern Vietnam, was only completed in 1885. The blank area around the delta was unknown and simply left blank. Second, physical geography was of keen interest, hence the topographic map. Third, this was a colonial map in the sense that it depicted the Red River Delta in French imperial geographies. The inset shows the underseas cables linking the Red River Delta to the rest of Indochina, Singapore, and eventually France.
A Google map image from 2020 oriented with north at the top reproduces early images of the delta as a green, wedge-shaped space.
The cultural geography of the Red River Delta has also been mapped.
The Red River Delta in particular, and northern Vietnam in general, are considered the cradle of Vietnamese civilization. Lê Bá Thảo argues that “the history of the conquest of the Red River delta” created the “Red River civilization” (Lê 1997, 317). As Weiting Guo shows for elsewhere in the Sinosphere, Vietnamese civilization has often been viewed in terms of its relationship to water. The Red River has been a short and swift river with frequently floods and both irrigation and flood control have been key communal projects and state functions among Vietnamese. The following map from Henri Brenier's Essai d'Atlas statistique de l'Indochine française shows the extent of both the dike and irrigation networks that help control water flows (Brenier 1914, 222).
Two important population centers in northern Vietnam are Hanoi, the current capital of Vietnam, and Thai Nguyen, an industrial center. A page later in this path explores cartographic representations of these urban spaces and their relationship to the surrounding countryside.
One final characteristic of the physical geography of northern Vietnam is the difference between the delta and the surrounding hills and mountains. The Việt Bắc, one of the strongholds of the Việt Minh during the First Indochina War, was located in these hills and mountains adjacent to the border with China.
Environment and Physical Geography
Environment and physical geography played key roles in how actors sought to maximize their opium profits. Below I discuss one aspect of this history that appears within the sources, and gesture towards another that is relevant to this story but not included in this module. Visitors to the module are encouraged to find additional ways that environment and physical geography might have affected the history of the opium trade, and to use this concept to link this module to the others.
Where mountains meet the sea
The Fujian littoral is a place of jagged coastline, small bays, scatterings of islands, winding peninsulas, and steep mountains that ascend from the shoreline. In short, it was and remains an extremely difficult place for states to keep watch over. The region's first foreign Commissioner of Customs, F. Nevill May, wrote in 1865 that Fujian’s mountains and rivers present “so many obstacles to the construction of canals and railways that they will probably never be introduced into this part of China.”* Fuzhou and Wenzhou—a large city in coastal Zhejiang only 207 miles north of Fuzhou—were only recently connected by rail, in 2003. The construction necessitated the excavation of no fewer than 53 tunnels.
The map below is geotagged to Xiamen, Shenhu Bay, Quanzhou, and Fuzhou in order to enable users to view the entirety of the Fujian coast from above (much like how the Japanese state sought to use airplanes to achieve a new view of Inner Asia). Zoom in and consider for yourself how difficult it must have been for the Qing state to try and keep powerful lineages like the Yakou Shi from breaking maritime laws.
The jagged and winding nature of the Fujian littoral was clearly an important part of the success of the Chinese and foreign network of opium traders discussed in this module. Because the opium trade was nominally illegal, the ideal scenario for people like Shi Hou and John Rees was to keep their dealings entirely invisible from the state. Arranging clandestine meetups offshore was clearly the way to go.
As the years went on, it became impossible for a trade of this volume to go on without any government awareness. Recall the video of Shenhu Bay: any person in any of the villages that overlook the bay and any person that travelled to the bay would have been able to see the British opium ships and the boats of their Chinese opium customers. It simply isn't that big of a place. Thus, as discussed more extensively elsewhere in this module, the opium smugglers of Yakou village and their British partners offshore arranged for systematic bribery of local officials to keep the trade going. At that point, the utility of a geographic location like Shenhu Bay was that it was not visible from other, more well-garrisoned parts of the coast. Officials who took bribes, it should be remembered, also needed to keep their secrets.
Environment, topography, and opium cultivation
The cultivation of opium poppies and production of opium is another side of the history of opium profits, which for the most part is not touched on within the sources included in this module. Historian Rolf Bauer's new book The Peasant Production of Opium in Nineteenth-Century India (Brill, 2019) is a fantastic place to start for anyone interested in this side of the story. Bauer's research into the production of Patna opium in India is exhaustive and wide-ranging, including detailed analyses of social formations, labor practices, and the changing interactions between peasant cultivators and the physical landscape over a century of opium production. Consider the following passage on irrigation in two environmentally very similar parts of India: Gaya, an opium producing region just south of the city of Patna, and Saran, just to the north of Patna. As Bauer shows us, there are rich possibilities for a spatial history of opium production, tracing out the interactions between human actors and the physical environment in the pursuit of opium profits:
Gaya's agriculturalists constructed irrigation facilities because the natural conditions basically forced them to. Saran's agriculturalists were less pressed to do so because the district's soil easily retained moisture… How can we explain this difference despite the similar conditions? Saran's relative progress was ascribed to the ambition of the local sub-deputy opium agent, then a Mr. Tytler, who was known for encouraging the construction of wells. On the one hand, this must be seen as a positive investment in Saran's infrastructure. On the other hand, the contracts for the construction of wells were a powerful tool to further press the cultivators.**
*Chinese Maritime Customs Microfilm, Reel 4, “Return on Trade at the Port of Foochow for the Year 1865.”
**Rolf Bauer, The Peasant Production of Opium in Nineteenth-Century India (Brill, 2019), p. 107.
Reorienting Our Scholarship
Bodies and Structures 2.0 allows us as scholars and students to take ownership of our maps. As we wrote in an earlier essay, “The map is not a given. We map, and in doing so we produce knowledge. But we also produce fictions, and elisions. Ownership entails the responsibility to map in ways that align with the ethics of our scholarship” (Ambaras et al. 2019).
Owning our maps leads to ontological and epistemological “so whats” and “takeaways.” The first contribution of Bodies and Structures 2.0 is ontological. The critical geographic and spatial humanistic theory that helped us to frame this project has been in development for over forty years. We are, in other words, not the first to recognize the need for multivocal mapping, for liberating the map, and for provincializing cartographic rationalities (Corrigan 2015; Pearson and Shanks 2014; Pickles 2012; Winichakul 1997; Certeau 1984). What Bodies and Structures 2.0 offers is the visceral experience of multivocal mapping—the ability to encounter and analyze historical experiences in multiple spatialities, with frameworks provided by our editorial collective and / or that readers supply via the Lenses tool. In the words of John Corrigan, the site’s collaborative design “fosters intersections in research” and “complicate[s] the stories we can tell.” It provides students, scholars, and teachers a way of approaching the past that “leverages the open-endedness and the polyvocality of spatial humanities and the often surprising insights derived from that enterprise to create narratives that are more inclusive, that bridge gaps, that challenge familiar categories of space and time as historical constructs that privilege some voices and marginalize others” (Corrigan 2021). Bodies and Structures 2.0 uses collaboration and digital methods to demonstrate not just the rich possibilities that multivocal mapping offers, but also the essential need to write and think in ways that presume the multivocality of space and place.
Essential Situatedness: From Critique to Structure
Bodies and Structures 2.0 invites readers to stand certain in the essential situatedness of knowledge and experience about space and place. It asks scholars to attend not to the question of “what” is space and place, but rather “whose space” and “on what terms?” It precludes metonymies of scale—allowing a history of one province, one individual, or one culture to stand in for the whole. Instead, it posits a deep map of modern East Asia that both spans the entire globe and renders such a universalized spatiality impossible.
As in the case of our critiques of cartographic rationality, we are not the first to suggest that the borders of “Asia” or “modern East Asia” are porous, that the spatial experience of Asia is always emergent, or that the meaning ascribed to the regional framework has more to do with geopolitics than lived histories (see, e.g., Tagliacozzo, Siu, and Perdue 2015a, 2015b, and 2019; Ho 2017; Duara 2010; Lewis and Wigen 1997). Bodies and Structures provides a research environment in which these insights are the foundation, rather than the critique. For example, the site does not gather its many cartographic images under a tag called “Maps.” Instead, the site uses the tag “Mapping” to place cartographic representations and regionalizations within a melange of ways in which historical actors have made spatial differences meaningful. Bodies and Structures conducts a mapping operation that is less about identifying parcels of absolute space or plotting specific steps in an itinerary, and more about cognitively reframing our perception of the rhetorics and technologies used to produce modern East Asia as a certain kind of space amenable to specific operations of power. Mapping includes many examples of historical cartography (e.g., “Cartographies of Northern Vietnam”; “Aerial Innovations in Mapping”; “Surveying Empire”; “Capital Punishment”). But it also includes the practice of ascribing higher artistic value to the works of artists in Japan's inner territories in contrast to those of “settler-artists” working in colonized territories (“Model Works”), the construction of the Lingquan Temple in Taiwan as a site of fusion between Chinese and Japanese Buddhism (“The Lingquan Temple: Taiwanese Buddhism”), and a Chinese lithograph that visualizes the future and traces its passage from Paris to London to Shanghai (“The Trottoir Roulant”). We know that the cartographic map occludes in order to illuminate. “Mapping” illuminates and then asks what else we need to include.
Through its visualizations, tags, and opportunities for nonlinear reading, Bodies and Structures enables users to read across places and, in so doing, shift from thinking about map as a noun to thinking about mapping as always already a verb. In a similar fashion, Bodies and Structures 2.0 approaches “scale” as an act of situated knowledge making and human action rather than a matter of absolute geometry. By putting the tag “media” onto a cartographic map (via the Lenses tool), for example, we can consider how representations and imaginative geographies operating in a given locality might be connected to others. Rendering the same tag relationships as a list affords a different possibility for visualizing the site’s contents, in this case suggesting the different ways and scales at which spatial processes were constituted and experienced: e.g., from the air, on the printed page, and in gendered, embodied movements that included the consumption and manipulation of new material objects and technologies.
The coexistence or simultaneity of different ways of constituting and experiencing space and time underscores the need to approach scale critically when deep-mapping modern East Asian history. Used without reflecting on the rationality that produces it, scale naturalizes particular spatial structures (e.g., local, regional, national, and international; or micro, meso, and macro) as space itself (see, e.g., Howitt 1998). Multiple scales—if they are constituted within the same, unspoken rationality—do not necessarily produce a critical spatial history. In contrast, Bodies and Structures 2.0 uses the tag “Rationalities” to highlight the logics of space and time that distinguish one spatiality from another. Though they exist in the same time and place, the spatio-temporality of a spatial structure governed by a “vital rationality,” for example, differs significantly from one governed by a “territorial rationality.” In the former, the time that a given living being can survive determines distance, including the meaning of adjectives such as “near” and “far.” In the latter, the ability of the bureaucratic and social structures of the state to demarcate and manage territorial boundaries determines the difference between “here” and “there” or “domestic” and “foreign.” Significantly, the difference between rationalities is not necessarily one that can be defined through comparisons within categories. Instead, Rationalities shows that different spatial logics define space and time by prioritizing completely different categories.
Rationalities suggests that scales are worth analyzing as historical phenomena in their own right. Here, for example, Peter Thilly’s comparison of the spatial logic of Qing regional administration and that of the Jardine-Matheson opium network is instructive. Both coexist in the same locale, the same time and place. Yet both produce very different spatio-temporalities and concepts of scale. Likewise, Sakura Christmas and Michitake Aso show how scale in the history of “aerial zones” is made up of non-overlapping layers of knowledge, history, media, topography, and political networks. Each scale enables or constrains the ability of aerial photographers, in Christmas’s example, or Viet Minh anti-biological warfare activists, in Aso’s example, to achieve their goals. In her analysis of the oral histories of Okinawan migrants to Taiwan, Hiroko Matsuda shows how these “liminal” actors produced their own scalar relationships through a combination of topographical, network, territorial, and market rationalities, even as their physical and social locations were shaped by the scalar politics of metropolitan bureaucrats, sugar capitalists, and other actors. Together, the Bodies and Structures modules show how attention to encounters between and across scales generates grounded and situated analyses that bring the spatiality of “modern East Asian history” to life on as many terms as there are histories.
Conceptual Deep-Maps: “East Asia” in Multivocal Space
Deep-mapping East Asia, or any region, requires taking ownership of our maps by recognizing the inherent multivocality of space and mapping our analyses within that multivocal space and its situated relationships of scale. Bodies and Structures 2.0 shows that such multivocal analysis produces spatial histories that push far beyond the traditional objects of spatial historical analysis. “East Asia” in multivocal space is an East Asia whose imaginative geographies and practices of orientation unfold in everyday objects as much as they manifest in maps, networks, and geopolitical articulations of region and culture. Library and exhibition catalogues, department store magazines, legal documents, medical devices, family albums, oral histories, and temple and community festivals reveal the mutual constitutions of space and place in the everyday and the extraordinary, the mundane and the liminal. In Emily Chapman’s module, Yajima Isao’s photography reveals how Yajima used space, place, and mobility to articulate his senses of masculinity, domesticity, agency, and selfhood. Weiting Guo shows how the inhabitants of the city of Wenzhou oriented their daily lives and senses of self by the city’s waterways. As Guo shows, the water oriented social life along non-overlapping spatialities of topography, geopolitics, lineage networks, imaginative geographies, and market. To write about Wenzhou, then, means to grapple with the multiple, coeval spatial sensibilities that intersect in everyday interactions, generate conflict, and structure social time. Likewise, as Maren Ehlers shows, it is fundamentally impossible to understand the history of smallpox vaccinations in early modern Japan without untangling the spatial structures that governed social relations. At the same time, attention to these structures reveals how important working with the particular territorial rationality of warrior rule was to early public health actors. Kasahara Ryō and other doctors did not merely operate within prevailing spatial structures. They used and adapted status boundaries, territorial jurisdictions, and imaginative geographies of center and periphery to accomplish their vaccination goals—all while contending with the demands of a vaccine/virus that required the presence of specific human bodies in specific places at specific times, even as weather and other environmental conditions threw up challenges to such movement.
In individual modules and through our method of reading across places, Bodies and Structures connects spatial structures to lived histories and specific localities: dialectically, as in a place-space relationship; via juxtapositions within spatial concepts and the space of the site; and analytically, through the tracing of multiple itineraries and routes along which people, things, and ideas circulated. Combining these forms of connection yields new approaches to classic concepts in the history of East Asia. For example, one can read across several modules to observe permutations in the spatial structure often referred to as the Sinosphere. Nathaniel Isaacson suggests how images of real and imagined trains and railroads reveal “a Sinosphere in flux—a hybridized landscape transformed by the presence of western technologies and epistemologies,” in which “the railroad running through the landscape symbolizes an era of change in the Sinosphere from the imperial center of a pax sinica, to one state among many.” Shellen Wu also offers an account of a Sinosphere in flux, as Republican officials sought to reconstitute territorial space via the internalization of global discourses of “the frontier” and the physical and imaginative domestication of Mongolia. Focusing on peddlers and migration, David Ambaras suggests that the Sinosphere continued to operate as a networked space that intersected with and adapted to the new territorial formations of the modern international system in the region. The endurance of the Sinosphere can also be seen in Mitch Aso’s account of North Vietnamese sociopolitical and scientific framings of the threat of biological warfare: while the Cold War radically transformed frameworks of international relations in East Asia, China remained an ideational and political hub for Việt Minh leaders, who “envisioned Vietnam rejoining a recreated Sinosphere world, this time linked not by Confucian culture but by communist party rule.”
The production of modern East Asia as globally networked space can also be seen in our module builders’ work on capital flows and the fixing of commodity exchanges in specific localities and sites. Peter Thilly’s project on the opium trade in 1830s Fujian, with its connection to both the Jardine Matheson network and to Qing lineage, exchange, and administrative systems, offers one window into this process of reconfiguration—one that is perfectly complemented by Tim Yang’s treatment of the displacement of the early modern Japanese patent medicine trade by a new kind of drugstore franchise system predicated on an American-style reorganization of urban public space and individual consumer attitudes. Noriko Aso’s module on Mitsukoshi Department Store, meanwhile, shows how new consumer emporia made themselves at home across the Japanese imperium; the glossy magazines she analyzes resonate with Sakura Christmas’s study of Manchurian Airways’ commodification and strategic appropriation of airspace, which for all its abstractions depended on highly localized exchanges of fuel and diplomatic ritual across the Eurasian landmass.
As it deepens our knowledge of classic concepts in the field, thinking dialectically, by juxtaposition, and through connection generates new sensibilities about what constitutes a key spatial concept in modern East Asian history. Concepts such as “pioneer” take on specific meaning and become sites of action in the context of East Asia’s overlapping colonialisms in modules by Evan N. Dawley, Magdalena Kolodziej, and Shellen X. Wu. Likewise, the spatial figure of “the Corporation” emerges as a significant player in the movement of commodities, the articulation of legal and political boundaries, expertise, and the day-to-day operation of colonial power relations in modules by Peter D. Thilly, Noriko Aso, Sakura Christmas, and Timothy Yang. Mitchitake Aso, Maren Ehlers, and Peter D. Thilly join with historians of science and the environment in identifying “biota” as a foundational actor and site of conflict in East Asian history. Those interested in the ways in which technologies and material objects (re)constitute space and place through their physical operations, social locations, and ideological affordances will find much to think with in the discussions of cameras, transport devices, and buildings that run through the various modules.
It is easy to overlook these concepts as foundational to modern East Asian history because, unlike a concept like “Sinosphere,” whose very morphemes signify “Asia,” terms such as “pioneers,” “corporation,” “biota,” or “camera” do not immediately invoke a specific place. It is easy to say that they circulate within East Asian history but they are not of East Asian history. But, as Bodies and Structures shows, the multivocality of space applies to the conceptual map of historical thinking as well—we need not define a specifically “East Asian” concept of pioneers, corporation, biota, or camera in order to underscore how each has instantiated significant spatial structures and served as a significant site of conflict in the many stories that make up the history of East Asia (Azuma 2019; McLaughlin et al 2021; Onaga 2013).
Conclusion
The digital structure of the site makes it possible to visualize new conceptual and thematic mappings and highlight a dynamic array of juxtaposition. It is also a practice that we hope to see carried out in different forms in more traditionally-structured print formats (see, e.g., Corrigan 2017) and other digital approaches to humanistic inquiry. Above all, we call for scholarship that starts from the three propositions that Doreen Massey articulated many years ago: first, that space is produced relationally, across multiple scales; second, that space is “the sphere…of coexisting heterogeneity”; and third, that space is “always under construction” (2005, 9). We see these propositions as foundational to an ethical scholarship that eschews the absolutisms and limitations of older conceptions of spatial inquiry and of the map itself.
Ethical scholarship requires owning our maps. Bodies and Structures owns its maps by underscoring their incompleteness and their situatedness. Our mappings reflect our own concerns as scholars as well as the history of knowledge production about East Asia, the uneven coverage and colonial categories of archives, and the limits and affordances of our own bodies, family systems, social positions, and institutional and social support networks. Bodies and Structures invites you to join in this process by examining how our mapping of East Asian history reflects, challenges, and expands your own.
References
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Pickles, John. 2012. A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge.
Tagliacozzo, Eric, Helen F. Siu, and Peter C Perdue, eds. 2015a. Asia Inside Out: Connected Places. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press.
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Thongchai, Winichakul. 1997. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
Border (in)security
Decisions at the border
Though many of these migrants settled easily into Japanese society, peddlers had also provoked concerns about their involvement in child trafficking and in the alleged procurement of human organs for making medicine.
Official suspicions of these mobile foreigners only increased in the years after World War I. Japanese authorities, worried about the illegal entry of unskilled Chinese workers, feared that immigrants might declare themselves as peddlers at their port of entry and then take up employments in contravention of Ordinance 352. In 1918, the Chinese and Japanese governments agreed to permit each other’s nationals to enter their countries without a passport or nationality papers. To prepare for this situation, in the same year, the government issued a directive authorizing prefectural governors to prohibit the entry into Japan of any foreigner who (1) lacked a passport or proof of nationality (Chinese were exempted from this provision); (2) was suspected of acting against the interests of the Japanese empire or abetting its enemies; (3) posed a threat to public order or morals; (4) engaged in vagrancy or mendicancy; (5) suffered from a contagious disease or any other ailment that posed another risk to public health; or (6) risked requiring public assistance due to mental illness, poverty, or other causes (Ōsato 1998; Yamawaki 1994).
For example, in September 1926, the Kyoto main office of the Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe Fuzhou Businessmen’s Local Origin Association (Keihanshin Futsuō Jitsugyō Dōkyōkai) submitted a request to Nagasaki harbor police that two brothers from Fuqing/Gaoshan, 15-year-old Lin Xianghu and 18-year-old Lin Xiangfan, be admitted to Japan as clothes peddlers; the association offered to act as guarantor for the boys. Nagasaki police contacted the Osaka government for information. In response, Osaka Governor Nakagawa Nozomu wrote, in a classified message to the Home and Foreign Ministers and to the governors of several prefectures:
Recently, many of the so-called cloth peddlers who come over from the Fuzhou area have switched to working as laborers or have committed theft and other delinquent acts, so controls on their entry into Japan have become more strict. Hence, to facilitate their entry, [peddlers] appear to have taken to issuing irresponsible promises of guarantee, as a formality, in the name of some association. Before this group was formed, another Fuzhou Local Origin Association had existed; it produced many delinquent elements, and we have many examples of its failure to follow through on its guarantees.
With regard to the two brothers, Nakagawa recommended admitting the younger, who was to be employed as a clerk in the cloth merchant’s main shop in Osaka, but denying entry to the older, who was to be a peddler in the shop’s employ (Shinajin mimoto hikiuke ni kansuru ken 1926, DAMFAJ 3.9.4.110).
Depictions of criminality
Surveillance of those Chinese admitted to Japan was quite rigorous, with port-of-entry officials wiring migrants' stated places of destination and the latter reporting back on their arrivals, departures, and movements. (See, e.g., Gaikokujin dōsei zassan Shinajin no bu. To my knowledge, no one has really worked on these documents: their contents or their modes of circulation.) Increasingly, government officials complained about the widespread presence of “gangs of delinquent Chinese,” particularly shoplifting gangs; men from Fuqing figured prominently in these reports. The press also weighed in with stories such as this 1928 article in the Asahi shinbun
A Major Chinese Shoplifting gang with 800 Members—Losses Nationwide Exceed 500,000 Yen—The Metropolitan Police Force Takes Determined Action
(This article noted that the Japanese common-law wife of a gang member was also under investigation for her participation—a sign of the dangers to Japanese women of involvement with Chinese men.)
The number of deportations of Chinese immigrants also increased significantly in the 1920s, provoking an outcry among the immigrant community and remonstrations from Chinese consular officials.
Popular fears of an influx of illegal unskilled laborers had also been a principal factor in the massacre of hundreds of Chinese, mostly from Wenzhou, in the Tokyo working-class neighborhood of Ōshima-chō in the aftermath of the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake—part of a pogrom that is better known for having taken the lives of some 6,000 Koreans (Niki 1993). Chinese in Japan had to live with both these images/suspicions of criminality and the knowledge of the potential for violence against them. These factors shaped their mobilities and subjectivities in ways that demand further investigation.

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