On August 30, Dr. Sunkyu Lee presented a paper titled Regionalizing Material Transformation of City Walls: Local Responses to Security Challenges in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Shandong China at the PNC 2024 Annual Conference and Joint Meetings.
The presentation examined the development and transformation of city walls in Shandong during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on the shift from rammed earth to masonry walls driven by security concerns. The study distinguishes between Shandong's non-coastal and coastal areas, with the latter gaining strategic significance due to its proximity to Korea and Liaodong amid Japan's invasion of Korea and the rise of the Later Jin. Employing entity and event markup methods on inscriptions from digitized local gazetteers, the research reconstructs 195 unique events in Shandong. It finds that 60% of these events occurred between 1500 and 1699, aligning with periods of intensified coastal violence and environmental challenges, such as frequent flooding. The preference for bricks and stones, despite their higher costs compared to rammed earth, indicates a strategic response to both security threats and environmental conditions, highlighting the complex interplay between technological, geopolitical, and environmental factors. The findings suggest that these material transformations were part of a broader trend across the empire, but also influenced by local environmental conditions and social relations. The study underscores the importance of further comparative research on the connections between infrastructure, security, and regional dynamics across different regions of China during the late imperial period.