Understanding cities in the premodern history of Northeast Asia, c. 200-1200

Northeast Asia's history is little known and much misunderstood. In the present day this region is the contact zone between China, Mongolia, North Korea and Russia. Right now it is the centre of a resource boom and a locus for regional tensions. In the past, too, it was always a zone of interaction. The pastoral nomads who are associated with the region are both romanticised and demonised in Chinese and Korean popular culture. Regimes rooted in the grasslands, like the Liao dynasty (907-1125) and its kindred, feature in films, television dramas and car advertising (www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWWKt9alpE4). China's recent Northeast Project draws upon historical evidence to claim that regimes based here were dependent on and derived from 'Chinese civilisation'. The Great Wall of China represents this divide between 'steppe and sown'. But in truth, the Wall as we know it was not built until the 15th century, whereas interactions across this region go back thousands of years. Northeast Asians, whether 'farmers' or 'nomads', did many of the same things from the earliest known times, one of which was to use cities.

Our records suggest that cities were one of the things that made Chinese civilisation superior to mobile pastoralist societies, but there were cities in the grasslands too: large, small, not always with walls, as old as Chinese empires. If cities were used by both Chinese and nomadic regimes, then they may have been more alike than we thought, but did 'nomads' use cities for the same things? What made a city and how were they organised? Who lived where and what did they do? Did the presence of cities mean the existence of a state? What were walls for?

This project will answer these questions by setting new material evidence in a long-range historical context. History relays the views of ruling elites, but people from the full social range lived in cities, and the real story is at ground level. Through closer integration of textual and archaeological methods than has been achieved until now, we will supply fresh evidence to reveal previously unseen patterns of everyday life in three borderland cities around Chifeng in Inner Mongolia, which were used by both 'sedentary' and 'nomadic' empires in the period from about 200 to 1200.

Our project, co-directed by a historian and an archaeologist, will enable us to see changing activities in the same cities under different types of rulers. We will assemble the sparse textual record for the Chifeng region and its cities in our period of interest, working with records of both sedentary and mobile regimes. This will provide a chronology of political and other changes against which to compare different layers of new archaeological evidence. We will use subsurface techniques - augering and magnetometry - to answer our questions about the physical form of these cities, which will in turn give us evidence for historical issues such as economic practices, power relations, industry and work, religion and expressions of identity. We will use Carbon-14 testing to date the layers that we find so that we can compare them as closely as possible to the textual evidence, making this the first study at this level of stratigraphic detail of Northeast Asian cities in grasslands locations.

Our evidence will provide the clearest picture yet of everyday life in urban centres outside the Chinese heartlands. This sharper view will challenge the dominant image of the superiority of Chinese culture in this region, will require us to think again about socio-political organisation and interactions of all kinds between groups in Northeast Asia, and will locate both China and the grasslands within a wider world. Our public presentations of this research will play with the idea of demolishing the Great Wall as a way of reaching the widest possible audience.

The main beneficiaries of our project will be in academia. Three other audiences would also benefit from improved understanding of Northeast Asia and its past, and consideration of the issues raised by this history.

1. UK policymakers and opinion formers: particularly those concerned with foreign policy, international business and community relations.
2. Audiences local to the project team's institutions (University of Birmingham (UoB), McGill, in Inner Mongolia): that is, visitors to museums, libraries and other cultural venues. UoB's annual Community Day had an estimated attendance of 10,000 people in 2012. Most events at the UoB Arts and Science Festival attracted 40-70 people. The city of Birmingham is noted for its 'superdiversity', which embraces BME groups including East Asians. McGill is located in the multicultural society of Montréal, local audiences in Inner Mongolia inhabit a region - and a country - where ethnic groupings are becoming increasingly salient.
3. Netizens - international online communities: English and Chinese Wikipedia pages on topics relevant to our project receive hundreds of views a day, revealing online and international audiences for our research.

All three audiences will benefit in largely similar ways, but by different means (see Pathways to Impact). This research challenges scholarly, official and popular perceptions that China has always been dominant in Eastern Eurasia. By drawing attention to the everyday interactions between diverse actors in a borderland area, we raise the idea that groups widely regarded as fundamentally distinct may have been more similar than we thought. We provide important historical context for a present-day situation in which the rich natural resources of Northeast Asia, and its location straddling the modern borders of China, Mongolia, North Korea and Russia, make it economically significant (Barta 2007) and politically contentious (Chase 2011, Gries 2005, Pak 1999). Our work suggests, for instance, more nuanced approaches to reports of demonstrations and a crackdown in Inner Mongolia (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/06/inner-mongolia-internet-crackdown). Such events are routinely presented by the Chinese government and western media as an ethnic conflict between Chinese incomers and Mongolian herders protecting an ancient way of life, and the Chinese government has made arrests for stirring up ethnic tension. Articles including images of horseriding herders and open-cast mines invoke deep-rooted ideas about 'the steppe and the sown' and may even suggest that this is a conflict between medieval and modern worlds. Our activities with all of our audiences will show the value of reducing the emphasis on issues such as ethnicity and competing ways of life, and instead considering a cocktail of other dimensions, including government policy, inter-ethnic cooperation and collaboration, and economic factors. The impact of our work will be to highlight that people of different cultures, languages and ethnic identities, and practising different economic activities, engaged in a complex set of interactions that is reflected in material remains even though it is stereotyped in the written record.

Each audience will also benefit in ways specific to them. Given the complex politics of most policy issues it is especially helpful for policymakers and opinion formers to be reminded that written texts are particularly prone to offering highly partial representations of views and events. Local audiences, including in Mongolia, will be introduced to the idea of demolishing the Great Wall as a way into considering issues of cultural and other differences, including in their own communities. Wikipedia users will learn about topics that are not widely known, and the international Wikipedia editing community will be able to engage critically with scholars providing research information, which will encourage reflection upon editing practices.