Place: Zoom/University of Vienna, Kolingasse 14-16, R. 2.38 (second floor)
Time: 15:00-16:30 CET
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Natural resources, especially minerals, were long described in local gazetteers, pharmacopeias, and encyclopedic compilations. Mining itself, however, posed distinctive challenges for Confucian-trained literati officials, who had to balance resource extraction with the maintenance of local order. Before 1850, only a handful of texts documented Chinese mining and metallurgical practices, most produced within the framework of mining administration. After 1850, mounting crises in the mining sector, including flooded shafts, capital shortages, corruption, and unrest, converged with the Qing state’s urgent military demand for coal and iron during the Self-Strengthening Movement (1861–1895).
This talk examines how mining knowledge moved from the field into new institutional settings and ultimately reshaped higher education. Challenges on the ground spurred translation projects, new publications, and the design of modern curricula. These developments shifted the focus from urgent military needs to broader strategies of resource exploitation that connected political economy, trade, and education. Drawing on archival sources, I revisit two little-known failures of Sheng Xuanhuai’s mining enterprises to show how practical difficulties in the field prompted institutional responses despite a persistent distrust of foreign expertise. By tracing this shift from field to university, the talk highlights how engineering education was institutionalized in late imperial China and how natural resources were redefined within a global industrial framework.
Dr. Hailian Chen is currently a Research Fellow at the TRANSMARE Institute, Trier University, and an associated research fellow at Ruhr University Bochum. She is an engineer-turned-sinologist trained at the Universities of Tsinghua and Tübingen. Her research centers on the history of technology and knowledge in human practices, with a particular focus on the dynamic interactions between technology, society, culture, and nature. She has examined the history of mining in Qing China, the governance of resources and commodities such as zinc and coal, and the development of engineering education in modern China. Dr. Chen is the author of the monograph: Zinc for Coin and Brass: Bureaucrats, Merchants, Artisans, and Mining Laborers in Qing China, ca. 1680s–1830s (Brill, 2018). More recently, she co-edited the special issue: Mobilising Global Knowledge: Institutionalising Expertise in East Asia’s Industrial Transition, for the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (2024).
