For early modern empires, mapping territory allowed for better knowledge of their realms and staked a claim to the space that was cartographically represented. Scholars of Qing China have endeavored to show how the Qing Empire (1644-1911) similarly represented and laid claim to its territory. Yet it remains little researched as to how an ordinary individual experienced the same space. Focused on the experience of the on-the-ground travelers, this project examines the literary and physical infrastructure that facilitated travel, the daily experience on the road, and the influences of travel on eighteenth-century China.

In this period, China was trying to find its way through a disruptive social transition from a traditional agricultural society whose laws and conventions had favored sedentary ways of living to a more itinerant society with enhanced mobility for a significant segment of the population. By reconstructing the material and cultural experience of travel, this project analyzes the challenges that this enhanced mobility posed for Chinese society. This project argues that this mass mobility and the state’s new ways of dealing with it created a social arena governed by new norms and values which propelled Chinese society into an early modern world in which individuals increasingly participated in the movement of bodies and the enhanced exchange of goods and information while the state searched for creative ways to control and profit from that movement and exchange.