The Borderlands of China and Korea

Abstract

This volume utilizes the concept of contact zones to reconceptualize the time and space around East Asian borders as meeting zones where multiple races, nations, and cultures interacted through the processes of exchange, coexistence, and acculturation. Focusing especially on the borderlands of China and Korea, the contributors document the shifts and repositioning of the contact zones of East Asia as well as the encounters and conflicts that transpired in these spaces, with historical materials spanning the period from the first to the early twentieth centuries and geographical regions from the Tibetan Plateau to Manchuria to the Korean Peninsula. What emerges is a rich account of how the historical changes in the contact zones significantly shaped the history of East Asia as a whole.