Speaker: Qiao Yang (History of Asia; Max Planck Institute for the History of Science; Berlin)

Under Mongol rule, China witnessed remarkable developments in its institutions of knowledge. A new type of local state schools – the divination school – was systematically established in large and small administrative units throughout Yuan China. These divination schools were based on the model of local Confucian schools and were led by state-appointed lecturers. They managed local diviners and prepared candidates for the court’s astronomical bureau. Why did the Yuan Mongol rulers promote local divination schools? This talk tackles the question by highlighting the tension between the court and the locale, which resulted from the nomadic practice of sharing out the empire’s material and human resources. I argue that rather than being a top-down initiative, the imperial orders for the establishment of local divination schools were a response to local Mongol elites’ patronage of diviners.