Tomoyasu Iiyama, Genealogy and Status: Hereditary Office-Holding and Kinship in North China under Mongol Rule, Cambridge (Massachusetts): Harvard University Asia Center, February 7, 2023. (ISBN 9780674291294)
By shedding light on a long-forgotten epigraphic genre that flourished in North China during the Mongol Empire, or Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368), Genealogy and Status explores the ways the conquered Chinese people understood and represented the alien Mongol ruling principles through their own cultural tradition. This epigraphic genre, which this book collectively calls “genealogical steles,” was quite unique in the history of Chinese epigraphy.
Northern Chinese officials commissioned these steles exclusively to record a family’s extensive genealogy, rather than the biography or achievements of an individual. Tomoyasu Iiyama shows how the rise of these steles demonstrates that Mongol rule fundamentally affected how northern Chinese families defined, organized, and commemorated their kinship. Because most of these inscriptions are in Classical Chinese, they appear to be part of Chinese tradition. In fact, they reflect a massive social change in Chinese society that occurred because of Mongol rule in China.
The evolution of genealogical steles delineates how local elites, while thinking of themselves as the heirs of traditional Chinese culture, fully accommodated to Mongol imperial rule and became instead one of its cornerstones in eastern Eurasia.
〈Research Introduction〉
Drawing on the genealogical texts, stele inscriptions, and oral history in North China, Iiyama has been exploring the acculturation, rise and fall of social institutions, reinterpretation of historical memories under non-Chinese regimes, and the subsequent formation of modern Chinese society. His ongoing research project attempts to shed light on the unknown trajectories of the resurgence and evolution of Yuan non-Han ancestries in north China from the late eighteenth century through the early twentieth century and their impact on the modern minzu identities.
Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Professor
IIYAMA, Tomoyasu
Tomoyasu Iiyama is Professor in the Faculty of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at Waseda University. Before teaching at Waseda, he has held a number of visiting scholarships at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Harvard-Yenching Institute, and the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University. His major publications include: Tomoyasu Iiyama, Civil Service Examinations in North China under the Jin and Yuan Dynasties: Another Trajectory of the Evolution of Literati Community in Chinese History (Kin gen jidai no Kahoku shakai to Kakyo seido: Mou hitotsu no shijin sō), Tokyo: Waseda daigaku shuppanbu, 2011 (in Japanese); Tomoyasu Iiyama; Zou Di, tr., Another Literati Society: Civil Service Examinations in North China under the Jin and Yuan Dynasties, Hangzhou: Zhejiang daxue chubanshe, 2021 (in Chinese).
（Created May 2023）
