Join us on Friday 6th October at 16.30 when Associate Professor Christopher Rea, University of British Columbia, considers The Art of Ingenuity: A Brief History of the Chinese Swindle Story.
Why do collections of swindle stories appear at certain times and places? In China, for example, the swindle story has experienced bursts of popularity during the late Ming, the early Republican era, the early Mao era, and during the last 20 years. And comparable works exist around the world.
This talk will consider what e.g. do Zhang Yingyu’s Book of Swindles (Ming China, 1617), Richard King’s The New Cheats of London Exposed (Georgian England, 1792), and P.T. Barnum’s The Humbugs of the World (Reconstruction-era United States, 1867) have in common?
Swindle stories, clearly, serve a double purpose: they teach techniques for navigating perilous social environments, and they entertain. But theirs authors tend to frame these narratives within a questionable claim: that ours is an age of unprecedented peril. Focusing on the example of China, this talk will highlight one thread running through literary history: connoisseur-ship of the swindler’s ingenuity.
Date: Friday 6th October
Time: 16.30 till 18.00 followed by a drinks reception
Venue: Screening Room,50 George Square, University of Edinburgh
Biography
Christopher Rea is Associate Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is author of The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China (California, 2015), which won the 2017 Joseph Levenson Book Prize (post-1900 China).
He is editor of China’s Literary Cosmopolitans: Qian Zhongshu, Yang Jiang, and the World of Letters (Brill, 2015) and Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays by Qian Zhongshu (Columbia, 2011); and co-editor of The Business of Culture: Cultural Entrepreneurs in China and Southeast Asia (UBC Press, 2015).
His mo
st recent book, translated with Bruce Rusk, is The Book of Swindles: Selections from a Late Ming Collection (Columbia, 2017); the original work, said to be China’s first collection of stories about fraud, celebrates its 400th anniversary in 2017.
Friday 6th October
16.30 till 18.00 followed by a drinks reception
Screening Room,50 George Square, University of Edinburgh
Click here to register for this talk and reception
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Lord Powell was the No 10 Downing Street adviser on foreign affairs and defence to Margaret Thatcher when she was Prime Minister and continued in the same role for John Major in the early part of his time as Prime Minister . Since then he has pursued a career in international business serving on the boards of several major companies , has played a leading part in many public institutions and sits as a non-party member of the House of Lords . He has had a close association with China since visiting the country with Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and subsequently with other British Prime Ministers and serving for many years as President of the China- Britain Business Council.
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Lanyan Chen, is an Associate Professor of Social Welfare and Social Development, holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of British Columbia and a Master’s in Communications from Simon Fraser University. She publishes in both English and Chinese and brings a perspective of feminist political economy to her areas of research.
Kai Vogelsang is professor of Sinology at the University of Hamburg. He studied Sinology and Economics in Hamburg and Taipei receiving a PhD in Hamburg (1997) and subsequently in Munich (2004). His fields of research are Chinese history of the pre-Qin period and the late 19th/early 20th centuries with a focus on conceptual history.
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