A Classroom Journey

Unusual Online Resources Bring Everyday China to Life

Students in Foreign Cultures 81 will be visiting the Tangxi City God Temple in China this spring. They’ll step inside the restored fifteenth-century building, examine the poetic inscriptions on its pillars, behold its sacred courtyards, and develop their own conclusions about the role of religion in Chinese society.

Although they may someday conduct field research in Asia, they’ll be studying the temple from 7,000 miles away in Cambridge, thanks to a rich database collected over time by one of their teachers, Peter Bol, Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and other Harvard scholars.

“The Culture of Everyday Life in China” immerses students in the history and customs of Jinhua, a region of southeastern China, through online maps, photographs, virtual tours, family records, interviews, and literature, as well as lectures and sections co-led by Bol and Professor of Chinese History Michael Szonyi.

A key component of the course is five research projects in which students use primary materials from the collection to pose and answer questions; they may read biographies of Jinhua residents, diagram economic networks, or annotate a map of gravesites. The class is designed to be interactive. Bol recalls, “We were talking about how Chinese fortune telling works. One student got on her cell phone, called her grandmother in China, and interviewed her about her favorite fortune tellers.”

The course immerses students in the history and customs of Jinhua through online maps, photographs, virtual tours, family records, interviews, and literature.

Although Bol and Szonyi approach history from different vantage points, they are adept at integrating print and digital materials and at making their subject matter enticing and relevant for their undergraduate and graduate students.

Adam Mitchell, a sophomore from Oktaha, Oklahoma, describes the pair as “perfectly complementary. Professor Bol specializes in the history of scholars and the intelligentsia of China, while Professor Szonyi teaches history from the social and economic perspectives of the common people. Professor Bol’s ‘top-down’ and Professor Szonyi’s ‘bottom-up’ approaches tend to meet somewhere in the middle in lectures. These stances have proved to be invaluable in understanding different methods of analyzing local history.” 

Learning from the countryside

Bol’s interest in China began as a high school student in the 1960s. Troubled by America’s lack of recognition for China—today the world’s fastest-growing economy—he decided to learn more. He went on to earn his PhD from Princeton and joined the Harvard faculty in 1985.

About 15 years ago, Bol began exploring local Chinese history as a way of engaging graduate students in social history. He chose Jinhua, which offers abundant historical information in the form of books, genealogies, paintings, wood carvings, and restored halls and temples. Bol and fellow faculty members, students, and volunteers traveling there have compiled a database that, among other features, contains panoramic images that give the user 360-degree views of architectural sites. 

In addition, Bol became fascinated by the power of spatial analysis—that is, the process of layering data to understand the distribution of populations, economic activity, or other social aspects. Thus began the China Historical Geographic Information System project, a repository of data about Chinese history from 221 BCE to 1911. It forms part of Harvard’s Center for Geographic Analysis, which Bol directs. He is also a leader with the China Biographical Database Project, an online relational database that includes nearly 50,000 people. 

Szonyi received his DPhil from Oxford University and joined Harvard in 2005 from the University of  Toronto, helping fill the department’s gap in social history. “Michael is of a new generation and extraordinarily talented,” lauds Bol. “He built his most path-breaking research on going into the countryside and gathering materials going back to the fifteenth century.”

The pair introduced Foreign Cultures 81 within the Core Curriculum two years ago, drawing on literature, history, anthropology, religious studies, sociology, and political science. (As the Core system recedes, the course will shift into the General Education curriculum next year under the name Culture and Belief 26.) For Szonyi, teaching with his primary mentor helps sharpen his ideas. “We work on the same place in a similar period but have very different ideas and approaches,” he says. “It’s exhilarating to work through those differences in the classroom. I don’t think I’ve ever met a more committed teacher than Peter. So collaborating with him in the classroom benefits all my students.”

Putting oneself in context

Like other courses included in the College’s General Education repertoire, “The Culture of Everyday Life in China” connects students to the world in which they live. 

For junior Wendy Wang, who is concentrating in sociology and music as a dual degree candidate at Harvard and the New England Conservatory, the class also provides a link to her heritage. Wang immigrated to the United States from China when she was nine and grew up in Boston, and she visits her native country each year. The two professors, she says, are “dynamic and engaging. Despite my knowledge of China, I’m constantly learning from them, especially through how they relate individual documents to the larger context of Chinese society.” 

The course allows students to understand Chinese history as preserved through memories, landscape, and social activities.

The strength of Foreign Cultures 81 clearly lies in the integration of technology with superb teaching. “It is nice to be able to virtually walk around a Chinese town, but without good lectures and rich secondary reading materials, the town is just a collection of interesting stuff,” says teaching fellow Max Oidtmann, a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages. “Professors Bol and Szonyi contextualize the images and draw details from them that speak to larger historical issues that transcend place and time.”