Center for East Asian Studies at University of Pennsylvania

To a lively cast of international players that shaped Manchuria during the early twentieth century, At the Frontier of God’s Empire adds a new perspective through the remarkable personal archive of Alfred Marie Caubrière (1876–1948). A French Catholic missionary, Caubrière arrived in Manchuria on the eve of the Boxer Uprising in 1899 and was murdered on the eve of the birth of the People’s Republic of China in 1948. Living with ordinary Chinese people for half a century, Caubrière’s documentation opens a unique window into everyday interaction between Manchuria’s grassroots society and various international players. His gripping accounts personalize the interplay of missions and empire in local society and illuminate vital issues in modern Chinese history, such as mass migration and religion, tensions between church and state, and the importance of cross-cultural exchanges in everyday life in Chinese Catholic communities. This intense transformation of Manchurian local society embodies the clash of both domestic and international tensions in the making of modern China.

Speaker's Bio:

Ji Li is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Hong Kong. She received her B.A. and M.A. at Peking University and her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the intricate relationship between religion, local society, and the making of modern China in a global context. She is the author of God’s Little Daughters: Catholic Women in Nineteenth-Century Manchuria (Washington 2015), Missions Étrangères de Paris (MEP) and Chinese Society (ed., Brill 2021), and At the Frontier of God's Empire: A Missionary Odyssey in Modern China (Oxford 2023).