Qing China in Global Perspectives: Launching the Centre for Central and East Asian Studies

UCL opened its doors in 1826. That same year was the sixth of the Daoguang reign. The Qing empire was governing a territory stretching from Manchuria to the Tibetan plateau, from Xinjiang to Taiwan. It administered bannermen and civilians under parallel legal codes, managed a Canton trade system that linked South China to the world, and corresponded in Manchu, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Chinese. UCL and the Qing were contemporaries. They shared a world. For most of the last two centuries, though, we have studied them as if they inhabited separate planets.

The Centre for Central and East Asian Studies (CCEAS) was founded this year to change that. Anchored in UCL’s Department of History, the Centre brings together scholars working across the histories, economies, and languages of Central and East Asia, with a commitment to crossing the disciplinary and regional boundaries that have partitioned the field. Its inaugural workshop, “Qing China in Global Perspectives,” June 5-6th 2026, drew over a hundred registrations and more than fifty attendees, both in person and online, for two days in the Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre. Nineteen researchers of mixed rank presented from UCL, Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Tsinghua, Peking University, Fudan, Hong Kong, Munich, SOAS, Durham, Macau, Manchester, and Copenhagen Business School, with scholars joining remotely from further afield, among them Mark Elliott (Harvard) and Lawrence Zhang (HKUST).

Study of the Qing has been caught between two gravitational pulls: a nation-state framework that reads the empire as a precursor to modern China, and a New Qing History that, indispensable as it has been, can seal off Inner Asian narratives from the economic, social, and material currents connecting the empire to the wider world. This workshop set out to refuse that partition, and the papers delivered on the promise.

Women at the centre of Qing governance

The opening sessions put gender and law front and centre. Feiyang Song (UCL) traced women’s agency through Qing judicial case files, showing how ethnic governance and imperial law intersected in individual lives. Supeng Wang (Oxford) turned to rural Nanbu County across the nineteenth century, examining how women navigated property and community institutions on the ground. Bing Yu (Durham) followed Protestant women medical missionaries into Manchuria between 1890 and 1920, where maternal care became a space shaped by both ambition and constraint.

The empire’s edges

Several papers pressed outward to the frontiers where Qing authority was most actively constructed, and most visibly contested. Chao Lang (Tsinghua) traced Xinjiang’s transformation from an imperial testing ground for new governance into a battleground of industrialization. Peng Zhao (Munich) reconstructed the crisis year of 1781, when the empire and Inner Asia teetered on the edge of upheaval. Two papers explored the religious architecture of imperial power: Ziyi Shao (SOAS) read the iconographic programme at the Fanhualou as a window onto how Qing emperors imagined their own spiritual authority, while Xu Yang (Macau) followed one imperial monastery through its destruction and reconstruction in the twentieth century, asking what it means to rebuild a sacred site in the name of the nation.

Feathers, cotton, and tea

Some of the workshop’s most vivid moments came through material objects. Rachel Silberstein (SOAS) followed raw and woven cotton from kapas to nankeens through the Canton trade, connecting South Asian production to Chinese and global markets. Lianming Wang (City University of Hong Kong) pursued peacock feathers along maritime networks linking Southeast Asia to Qing material culture. Huirong Cheng (Edinburgh) told the story of a Scottish merchant and the globalisation of Chinese tea in the decade after 1845. These papers shared a conviction that commodities are never just commodities: they connect and reshape the world.

Migration, mobility, and the structures of power

Questions of who moved, who stayed, and who rose ran through much of the second day. Qingrou Zhao (Edinburgh) investigated what drew Chinese migrants into the Shanghai International Settlement between 1853 and 1943, while Chicheng Ma (HKU) took on the long-running debate about the culture of growth in China across four centuries. Christoph Hess (Cambridge) asked a deceptively simple question: why did serfdom vanish in the early Qing? Xizi Luo (Manchester) brought quantitative methods to generational mobility among bannermen and Han Chinese elites, and Yiling Zhao (Peking University) examined how the military examination system shaped official careers. Yan Hu (Copenhagen Business School) traced the networks and career paths of minority bureaucrats within the Chinese Maritime Customs Service.

Two closing papers returned to questions of property and power. Zizhuo Liu (Tsinghua) explored contract innovation and property rights in Qing Taiwan, a frontier where legal creativity flourished precisely because central authority was thin. Hanzhi Deng (Fudan) examined trade recession and social conflict in the Middle Yangzi, and Gary Luk (CUHK) brought the workshop to a close with a study of piracy and shifting power in the late Qing.

Keynote: Cameron Campbell on kin networks and elite persistence

Cameron Campbell delivered the keynote lecture on a question that connects demographic history, social stratification, and the long-run dynamics of inequality: how elite families maintained their position across generations in Qing China. The lecture spoke directly to the workshop’s broader preoccupation with the mechanisms through which power reproduces itself.

A young field, a new centre

What stood out most about the workshop was its generational energy. Many presenters drew on dissertations recently completed or still underway. The discussions, chaired by Jennifer Bond (UCL), Nora Yitong Qiu (UCL), Lars Laamann (SOAS), Melanie Xue (LSE), Bishnupriya Gupta (Warwick), and Kent Deng (LSE), paired senior expertise with early-career ambition. This is a field in motion, and the Centre for Central and East Asian Studies intends to help shape where it goes.

CCEAS supports collaborative scholarship that bridges disciplinary boundaries and engages with multilingual source materials. Through workshops, reading groups, visiting speakers, and public events, the Centre offers a home for historians, social scientists, and area specialists working on Central and East Asia from the early modern period to the present. 

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