DFG-Project 2024-2027, led by Dr. Nanny Kim (GSSC)

Project Description: 

The exploitation of mineral riches in the highland region of southwest China and northern Southeast Asia decisively shaped its history. Specifically, large scale metal mining played a major role in Chinese in-migration, the formation of communities and networks. This process began in the medieval period and greatly intensified during the Ming and Qing and was ruptured in the mid-nineteenth centuries civil wars. Due to systematic underrepresentation in late imperial Chinese records, the role of this this sector and of Chinese non-state actors in the region’s history has been underassessed. To test this hypothesis and pursue its implications, the proposed project employs empirical, inter-disciplinary methodology that combines history, geography and anthropology. It pursues two research strategies: The first consists in fieldwork-based micro-historical explorations on mining areas to collect data on historic trajectories from their formation to socioeconomic strategies following the end of mining and down to the present. Research will reconstruct village ethno-histories and land use and landscape transformations, embedded in regional and over-regional networks and connectivities. The second strategy uses a WebMapServer of historic transport routes and mines. Data consists of geodata of sites and routes as well as overviews of the history of major mines, most of which has been produced by the applicant in previous projects. The WMS allows systematic historico-geographical analysis of local data and thus constitutes an important tool for developing and testing interpretations. For example, measured distances in conjunction with average values on day stages and costs of transport allow assessing durations and costs of shipping supplies into a mining area. In addition, the WMS will facilitate academic exchange and collaboration as well as accessibility of results for heritage projects, education and the interested public. The exploration of Chinese borderland mining communities will contribute to understanding transformations that were driven by resource hunger, induced migration and settlement, and eventually to the expansion of imperial power. Although resembling colonialism, the process differed in a fundamental aspect: Chinese migrants, who set up their communities in contravention of imperial restrictions on migration and mining, operated in a precarious zone of usually tolerated but potentially illicit existence, both in the societies and polities into which they inserted themselves and with the Chinese imperial state. Results are expected to throw new light on structures in history and present-day societies in the studied region.

Conducted by Amtul Shaheen, M.A. as part of her doctoral research. 

PhD Project conducted by Zixuan Zhang, M.A. 

Project led by Prof. Dr. Susanne Brandtstädter and Dr. Panitda Saiyarod 

Project Description: 

This project examines the infrastructures that sustain Chinese tea economies across Southeast Asia in order to understand how regional worlds are constituted through the circulation of commodities, cultural practices, and social relations. Anthropological studies of infrastructure have largely focused on large-scale development projects such as roads, pipelines, and transport corridors, often in the context of contemporary geopolitical initiatives including China’s Belt and Road Initiative. While such projects undoubtedly reshape regional connectivity, they do not alone account for the durable socio-economic worlds that link China and Southeast Asia. Long before the emergence of modern infrastructure corridors, regional connectivity was already sustained through commodity networks, diasporic merchant institutions, and cultural practices that organised exchange across maritime and upland Asia. Chinese tea offers a particularly revealing entry point into these processes. For centuries, tea has circulated through networks connecting production landscapes in China with trade centres, plantation regions, and cultural institutions across Southeast Asia. The infrastructures that sustain these circulations—plantation systems, merchant networks, knowledge regimes of tea expertise, and institutions of tea culture—constitute a socio-material foundation for regional economic and cultural worlds.

By tracing these infrastructures ethnographically, the project demonstrates that regional integration is not only a product of state-led development initiatives but also emerges from the interaction between commodity networks, cultural value systems, and moral economies. Tea economies rely on systems of trust, expertise, and shared aesthetic and ethical frameworks that organise exchange within diasporic trading networks and rural production systems. These moral economies shape how tea is cultivated, traded, evaluated, and consumed, linking economic practices to broader cultural and ethical orders. At the same time, contemporary infrastructural initiatives associated with the Belt and Road Initiative increasingly intersect with these long-standing commodity networks, reconfiguring routes of circulation and forms of regional connectivity. By examining tea infrastructures across plantation landscapes, trading centres, and cultural institutions, the project reveals how everyday commodities mediate the relationship between local moral economies and large-scale geopolitical transformations. In doing so, it offers a new perspective on the socio-material foundations of regional worlds in Asia and contributes to broader debates on infrastructure, value, and economic life in anthropology.

Conducted by Panitda Saiyarod, PhD, culminating in her PhD thesis.