Regionalizing Infrastructures in Chinese History (RegInfra) and The Lives and Afterlives of Imperial Material Infrastructure in Southeastern China (InfraLives) are research projects conceived and led by Hilde De Weerdt, Professor of Chinese and Early Modern Global History at KU Leuven.
The two projects critically analyse how large-scale infrastructures contributed to regional and empire-wide integration, why and how processes of integration broke down, and how infrastructure projects contributed to countervailing trends including local tensions, local autonomy, and cross-border regional formations in late imperial Chinese history (ca. 1000-1800). We aim to map, compare, and critically analyse the historical material infrastructures on which Chinese polities of the past have been constructed. By putting these infrastructures at the centre of a comparative investigation we will explain how infrastructures have mediated and reshaped relationships in a variety of dimensions of social life.