Eloise E. Wright

In the city of Dali, colonized successively by the Mongol and Ming empires, local elites sought access to power using tools of the imperial system. My thesis will examine one of these tools, literacy in Classical Chinese, the language of government and elite culture throughout the empire. I will use gazetteers, inscriptions, and local archives to identify the institutions that mediated indigenous elites’ access to political power in Dali in a changing political climate, to situate these institutions within Dali society, and to delineate the networks of literati that formed around them. The compilation and production of collaborative works like gazetteers via these networks further shows the transformation of the linguistic and cultural identities of Dali local elites under colonial rule.

This study analyses the materiality and spatial arrangement of commemorative stele inscriptions at Buddhist temples and historical sites. In the region around Dali—in southwest China—Buddhist temples have been public spaces defined by practices of pilgrimage and tourism for more than 1,000 years. The written traces left on these sites provide a window into how audiences read or understood the steles they viewed. Texts read by literati travelers and pilgrims in early modern Chinese empires sit among modern tourist signage. As texts continued to accumulate on these sites, they have acted as forms of ‘Buddhist Public Space’ where different reading publics contended over the sites’ meaning.