Agrarian Studies Colloquium: Yuan Gao ""Stringing Beads": Karez Irrigation and Property Rights in Qing China's Arid Land"

The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.

This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.

It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms are meaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?

Meetings are Fridays, 11am -1pm Eastern Time.

Meetings will be held in a hybrid format, both on Zoom and in-person at 230 Prospect Street, Room 101.
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Yuan Gao is an Assistant Professor of Chinese History at Case Western Reserve University. She received her Ph.D. in History from Georgetown University in 2024. Prior to that, she received M.A. in Eurasian studies at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan. Yuan is an environmental historian of northwestern China and Central Eurasia. Her research focuses on the intersection of empires, economic extraction, and environment, with a particular emphasis on the Eurasian borderlands of Qing China and imperial Russia. She is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively entitled Tigers and Locusts: Environmental Changes in Late Qing Xinjiang. Through the extinction of Caspian tigers and recurring locust plagues, this project tells stories of environmental changes in Xinjiang under Qing rule in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Moreover, by situating this arid region globally, Yuan argues that the environment of the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang played a pivotal role in shaping the global discourse on arid land, desiccation, and the intricate relationship between humans and nature. Yuan’s research is supported by fellowships and grants from Georgetown University, Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, UNESCO Silk Roads Youth Program, the Cosmos Club, and OYCF-Chow Fellowships.