During the long history of encounters between the Han and non-Han people, the Han writers produced many texts that represent the non-Han as the other. These texts are in the genres of local gazetteers, travelogues and miscellaneous notes, and they narrate about the geographical, institutional and social traits of the non-Han regions and people. Among the profuse information they provide, the description of tourist sites and local produce and food often goes beyond factual record and is loaded with feeling and imagination. This essay centers around texts about the encounter, conflict and negotiation between two female Guizhou chieftains, one dated from the Yuan, the other from the early Ming, and the central government, and discusses how clothing and food are represented as symbolic tokens of political exchanges between the leaders of the court and the borderland. As the rebellious female chieftains is given the honorary title of “martyr,” whereas buckwheat, the main food crop of the region, is used as the ingredient of “golden crispy cake” that bears the pattern of nine dragons and presented to the emperor himself as the female chieftain’s tribute, the stories of female chieftains are transformed from strategic negotiation between the central authority and borderland power to a side dish of exotic flavor in the feast of multi-ethnic unified empire.
About the Speaker
Siao-chen Hu is Research Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy in the Academia Sinica, Taiwan. A specialist in early modern Chinese literature, especially Ming-Qing narrative and women’s literature, she is the author of 2011; A Conflicted New World, 2003, and many articles in journals such as Bulletin of the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Chugoku bungaku, and Research on Women in Modern Chinese History. She received the Academia Sinica Research Award for Junior Research Investigators and the Taiwan Wu Dayou Research Award from the Taiwan’s National Council of Science. She was one of the recipients of the 1st Scholarly Monograph Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences offered by Academia Sinica in 2012. Her manuscript on Ming-Qing literary representation of China’s southwest region will be published in February 2017.
