EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 189 Bond Jennifer (SOAS, University of London) Internationalizing and InstitutionalizingWomen’s Bodies: The YWCA within Mission Schools for Girls in Republican Era Zhejiang, 1923–1949 Key words: China, education, Christianity, nationalism, gender This paper explores the role of the YWCA Student Department as it functioned within mission schools for girls in Republican Era Zhejiang. Based on an analysis of the YWCA magazine The Green Year, (1916–1948) held in the Shanghai Municipal Archives in conjunction with mission school annual magazines, this paper probes how women’s bodies were regulated, disciplined and trained within the confines of missionary schools for girls. The YWCA Student Department, originally founded in the American Southern Presbyterian School for Girls in Hangzhou in 1890 and drawing much of its sup- port base from missionary school students throughout the Republican period, has been understudied. The case study of the YWCA within Yongjiang School (Riverside Academy), an American Presbyte- rian and Baptist school originally established by Mary Ann Aldersey in Ningbo in 1844, shows how the aims of the YWCA reinforced the goals of missionary education for girls. The YWCA provided organizational experience, leadership training and fostered an international identity for women as part of a global Christian citizenship. It also used the school to recruit future secretaries and carry out its mission of creating an international Christian sisterhood in a very visible way upon pupil’s bodies: training them in domestic education and hygiene, inculcating internationalism through pageants and plays, and exercising their bodies through physical education and summer camps into healthy future citizens. This paper probes how young women received this education, combining nationalism, Chris- tianity and feminism in their own unique and radical way. By highlighting pupils’ participation in global networks for women, we can better understand how Christianity and international ideas about women’s education were adapted at the local level, helping to breakdown outmoded binaries between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, ‘east’ and ‘west’ still prevalent in discourses about women’s education and social status today. Chen Jiani (SOAS, University of London) Shaping and Circulating A Transforming Courtesan Image in Her Poetic Collections and in Anthologies Key words: transforming courtesan, fluid image, Zhongshan xian, Late Ming, Nanjing Yang Wan 楊宛 (ca. 1600 — ca.1647) was a well-known courtesan of late Ming Nanjing who left us with the possibly only extant individual collection by a Nanjing courtesan around her period. This poetry collection Zhongshan xian 鍾山獻 and its three sequels were compiled and published by her husband Mao Yuanyi 茅元儀 (1594–1640), a famous literatus from a gentry family to whom she married at sixteen sui. As a courtesan-turned-concubine/wife, Yang Wan shaped a fluid literary identity oscillating between a courtesan lover whose desire and longing was implied in depictions of passionate dreams and erotic moments, and a virtuous woman who properly performed her domestic duties as a wife, a mother, and a daughter. This fluid literary identity is represented in many ways such as her imagination of her natal home which combined a decent family and her experience in Qinhuai pleasure quarter, her poetic interaction with her husband which extended beyond the conventional responding poems between couples, as well as her