Editorial Note

These articles began as papers for the Second Conference on Middle Period Chinese Humanities, held at Leiden University in September 2017. Those who attended the conference were in an especially fortunate position to see the future of the field taking shape. Emerging and junior scholars were presenting exciting new research, in both English and Chinese, which was shifting established paradigms and demonstrating innovative techniques. The conference captured an important moment within the field: both a generational transition and a geographic shift away from coastal American universities towards research centers in Asia and Europe.

Eight papers stood out as especially innovative and intriguing. Written by scholars based at institutions in Taiwan, the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom, as well as the United States, they are indicative of the growth and evolution of the field. We decided to experiment with a new collaborative editorial model, in which senior scholars would work alongside the Editor in order to mentor the authors through the time-intensive process of turning conference papers into journal articles. I am grateful to Beverly Bossler, Valerie Hansen, Charles Hartman, and Richard von Glahn for their service as Associate Editors, providing expert advice as the authors continued to refine their research questions and to revise their pieces for publication. Several of the authors in this volume of JSYS are publishing their work for the first time, and some for the first time in English, and their professionalism and dedication has been commendable.

We have organized the papers into four thematic sections of two articles, which naturally dovetailed from the beginning, but converged even further during the revision and editing process. The articles in the first section, "Bureau cratic Institutions and Information Networks," present a dynamic view of the Song bureaucracy by tracing flows of personnel and information through complex and shifting channels. The second section, "Social Networks and Elite Identity," contributes new research on the local networks and institutional practices that enabled Southern Song and Yuan literati to politically mobilize their allies at court as well as to engage in ad hoc collective support for their penurious peers. The authors of the third section, "New Sources of Geographic Knowledge," explain how Chinese tomb inscriptions from the Liao and the only surviving township gazetteer from the Song present authoritative visions of space and place for the elites who commissioned them. Fourth and finally, "Market Cultures of Production and Consumption" features two investigations of the cultural dimensions of commercialization during the Song, when the production of copper and the consumption of fake and forged goods represented anxieties as well as providing opportunities for literati and the court. Each of the associate editors has written an introduction that frames the two articles in their section, explaining how and why these papers, and their authors, advance the frontiers of research in the history of Middle-Period China by finding new answers to new questions. For all of us, working on this volume has been an exceptional learning experience, and I am delighted and grateful to have shared it with such collegial collaborators.

ADL
June 2019