jueves, 14 de mayo de 2015

SILK ROAD LECTURE, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

“The Tea Road”:  Shanxi Merchants and the Expansion of Chinese Trading Network in the Mongolian Steppe”

By Zhijian Qiao, Ph.D. candidate, History, Stanford University

Time:  Thursday, May 21, at 7:30 p.m.
Place:  Knight Bldg., 521 Memorial Way (behind Memorial Auditorium), Room 102

Summary: 
After the collapse of the central Asian caravan trade in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the old silk road was never able to revive its rigor. Yet, in the eighteenth century, the simultaneous expansion of the Manchu and the Russian empire and their interactions opened a new trade route to the north that cut through the Mongolian Steppe. With Chinese tea being the defining commodity, this new trade route is often dubbed the "Tea Road”. In addition to offering an overview of the history of the tea road, this talk will examine a number of major historical transformations that made it possible. At the center of the story lies the Qing conquest and incorporation of Mongolia, and the northward expansion of the Chinese commercial network, which was spearheaded by the Shanxi merchants. 

Zhijian Qiao is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History, Stanford University. After years of archival research, he is currently writing his dissertation, which reconstructs the history of the famous Shanxi merchants of early modern China, arguably the most powerful business network in imperial Chinese history. His research traces the formation of the Shanxi mercantile network in the context of the Qing imperial expansion, and also analyzes the institutional foundation of that network. In his view, Shanxi merchants effected a series of key institutional changes that radically altered the outlook of the Chinese economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.