Recapping the “Workshops for the Final-Year RPg Students 2021-22” held on 19 November 2021

The Division of History organised the “Workshops for the Final Year RPg Students 2021-22”, which offered an interactive sharing platform for the Department’s research postgraduate students to exchange and discuss their research findings. Prof. PUK Wing Kin, Division Head, delivered opening remarks to the students and encouraged them to interact with each other.

Recapping the Academic Seminar “我如何在《東吳歷史學報》出版有關周茂蘭血疏貼黃題跋藁的論文” conducted by Prof. PUK Wing Kin on 19 November 2021

In the Graduate Seminar on 19 November, Prof PUK Wing Kin shared with our students his experience of publishing in academic journals in his lecture titled “How I published ‘Zhou Maolan’s Tiehuang and its Postscripts: A New and Everlasting Text in Blood’ in Soochow Journal of History.” He encouraged students to be persistent in their efforts in having their works published as the process of revising and resubmitting can often be a lengthy exercise of more than 1.5 years. He then shared how the film Red Violin inspired him into discovering the history of a memorial written in blood in the Ming Dynasty. Between 1625 and 1626, Zhou Shunchang, a Ming official well known for his outspoken opposition to the tyranny of Wei Zhongxian the infamous palace eunuch, was arrested and tortured to death, together with twelve other officials. After they were rehabilitated during the reign of the new emperor Sizong (reign title Chongzhen), Zhou Shunchang’s son Zhou Maolan submitted a memorial written in his own blood supplicating for the new emperor’s mercy and justice for his father. Over the course of more than three hundred years, the tiehuang (the summary of a memorial) grew from a small sheet to a substantial set of two scrolls of postscripts in prose, poem, and seal. Down the generations, the artefact left the Zhou family, changed ownership, crossed over national borders and finally reached the Bei Shan Tang Foundation in Hong Kong. During this journey, the tiehuang witnesses historical transformation, registers individual and collective trauma, emotions, memory and yearning, grows in size, and in this sense becomes a new and everlasting text in blood.

Best wishes from the Department.
Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2022!

The newsletter will resume on 10 January 2022.

For teachers and students who have information to share with the Department, please email your articles in both Chinese and English to chanfiona@cuhk.edu.hk by 4:00pm every Monday.