History Professor Pens Book on China
Professor of History and East Asian Studies Hugh Clark is the author of a new book, The Sinitic Encounter in Southeast China through the First-Millennium CE (University of Hawaii).
The book looks at two neglected themes in China’s long history: the integration of lands south of the Yangtze River into China and its impact on Chinese culture. The roots of Chinese civilization are commonly traced to the North. For the past one thousand years the South has been the cultural, demographic, economic—and, on occasion, political—center of China, but the process whereby this was accomplished has long been overlooked in Chinese historiography.
Clark has just returned from Paris as an invited participant at the conference “Taiwan Maritime Landscapes from Neolithic to Early Modern Times: Cross-Regional Perspectives,” sponsored by the College de France and the Ecole Française de Extrême-Orient. He gave a paper titled “Material Remains and Open Hypotheses: Pondering Links Between the Pre-Sinitic Cultures of the Central Coastal Region of Fujian and Taiwan From Pre-History through the 1st Millennium CE.”