Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, The University of Hong Kong

Qi 齊 emerged as a powerful territorial state in Shandong, eastern China between the seventh and fourth centuries BCE. Over this period, a notable transformation occurred in the political and spatial organization of the Qi state whereby traditional lineage and kin-based power structures were replaced by centralized institutions predicated on certain principles of territorial rule, including direct infrastructural and administrative control over lands, populations, and resources. To understand this shift and its broader implications for the spatial dynamics of state-building in early China, I synthesize a wide range of paleographic, archaeological, received textual, and numismatic evidence for Qi, focusing especially on three areas: (1) the urban development of the Qi capital at Linzi into an administrative-economic hub; (2) the construction of the southern frontier and the Long Wall of Qi; and (3) the introduction of Qi coinage and monetary zones. Through these analyses, I demonstrate that the territorial imprint of the Qi state was made strategically upon both the physical environment and imagined landscapes of Shandong in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods.