Close-up view of warriors from Qin Shi Huang's army; photo by Peter Dowley, 2008.
The Rise of the Qin Empire and the End of Historiography in Early China
Vincent Leung (Visiting Research Scholar, ISAW)
NOTICE: Admission to the ISAW Lecture Hall closes 10 minutes after the scheduled start time
--Reception to follow
The Qin empire (221-206 BCE) is the shortest dynasty in all of Chinese history, but yet its legacy is extraordinarily complex and immense. Internationally, it is perhaps best known for its underground terracotta army, still quietly standing guard in the mausoleum of the First Emperor after more than two thousand years. In this presentation, Leung will explore a more obscure, but no less remarkable, legacy of the Qin empire. It is a legacy not in the realm of material objects, like the terracotta warriors, but in political thought. Leung will discuss the curiously antagonistic relationship that the Qin saw between empire building and the writing of history and why, for the Qin, a good empire is one that is entirely forgetful of its past and obviates the need for all historical writings in the future. As Leung will argue, it is a truly astonishing vision of the creation of empire as the end of historiography, and indeed, the end of all history.
Vincent Leung received his doctorate in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 2011. He also holds an A.M. in Regional Studies—East Asia from Harvard University (2002) and a B.S. in Mathematics and Economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (2000). Since 2011, he has been an assistant professor in the History Department of the University of Pittsburgh.
Dr. Leung is broadly interested in the political and intellectual history of early China in the long first-millennium BCE. He is currently finishing a manuscript, based on his dissertation The Politics of the Past in Early China, that studies the different ways in which history became a contentious language for political debates under the rise of empires in early China. At ISAW, he will begin a new research project, entitled “Empire and Things: On the Genealogy of Commodities in Early China,” on the history of economic thought in early China. It will be a study of the many anxious and contentious intellectual responses to the radical transformation of the world of things under the rise of empires in early China in the late first-millennium BCE.