 Hi, my name is Igor. I'm really happy that I can come here and I very much would like to thank you for the invitation. I normally do not prepare my talks today. I did prepare it and even wrote it down, which makes me very stressed. And so I'll just maybe not look at my notes and try to carry on this topic. It's a very different take than most talks I think you would hear today. I decided to go a little bit broader and make a certain reflection after writing the books, as you said, very much focused on the province. I mean, I kept such one in my focus, but maybe some kind of other event in life would have put me to study Shanshi province or Hebei or any other province. So the big question comes. It's kind of a theoretical quandary, really. Why would you even want to research Chinese provinces to start with or even think of kind of a provincial space, something that we might want to research and what kind of problems are there because it might seem like a great topic. I'll write a book about Sichuan, but I would rather say, think twice or think even more and so for the next, let's say 20 minutes, 30 minutes, I'll talk about it. And we are very much justified in being annoyed at much what is happening within any scholarship on Earth. I mean, that is the function of historians or anthropologists, archeologists or any other decent humanistic and divorce that we shouldn't be very much satisfied as what we find there on the shelves and try to find the new questions, how to go forward. And we're quite, we could quite justly say that in Chinese studies, we can be annoyed with this China, a notion of a country that we can just study that is very large geographically, immense population. And so once we pick our case studies and say, well, this is book about China. It sounds a little bit ridiculous. When you face, if you study Qing Dynasty, some 450 million people who study something pertaining to today's era, 1.4 billion people and very large area. So that's problems really stays in front of us. This name China appearing in all the books might really just mislead us into thinking that, in fact, this book is not about China, it's about some little aspects. So should we really just sort of have this flag all along in there? But there's so many books that say that. Another thing that whenever you pick a book publishing the People's Republic of China, and if you notice every title starts from Tunguo, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta. So, but this book's really about this. Is it really that Tunguo? So you said, what is the fallacity here? It's a very large fallacity because it makes us think that, and again, the set of case studies are actually representing China. And if you notice that, if you try to map them geographically, you would find very fast in this book about a fairly limited set of regions, a fairly limited set of problems that then get authority of having a Tunguo on the top of it and representing a whole China. But does it really? And so, other thing is that this China is being very much ratified. So just continuing on this topic. If we very much look at these studies, where the case studies come from, they come usually from certain geographical regions. We have much more studies coming from Jiangnan. We have plenty of studies about Shanghai on Beijing. But once you start going into a good research library in China studies, you suddenly realize that by the shelves about Yunnan or Sichuan or I don't know, Gansu, that, you know, there are just first few books in there, many of them dusty and nobody writes it. So the big China, whether it would appear in the Western language studies or in Chinese language studies, so more often than not, are regional studies or sets of case studies that then get stretched very much to cover the real China. But they don't really do the job. So I think as historians, we should, historians or other, you know, branches of humanities, we should be very much aware that perhaps we're dealing here with a grand problem, the problem that, well, this China, can we really study it? And what is the take we can, you know, have, you know, or at least some kind of a decent method into dealing with the size of a topic that we are actually truthful to our case studies. And what they would carry on is just telling you about one fairly attractive, perhaps way of doing it and telling you what kind of problems we have with it. So, you know, province, what is an easy, beautiful exit? You know, well, I don't want to study China, I would then pick Sichuan. So here we have a lot of people who like Sichuan, but we don't pick, I don't know, Hubei or I mean Hubei, you know, why not? You know, just we got our beautiful provinces and here we're happy. Well, there is a number of fundamental palaces that come in game, which I would like to make you aware of. And one of the first one is, well, you know, provinces just look like something else. How do they look like? Like European nation states. They have pretty much the same sizes. They have these beautifully demarcated borders. Very often, they have a nice center, a capital. Whoa, we're home, yes? We have a capital, we have province, we have borders. There are even nice neat mountains very often all around the main river passes. God, we're like in Germany, England, France, Poland, Italy. Oh, we're home, yes? Now, we can do basically a national history by doing the provincial history, then we are on the top and we're all done. Well, you know, this is pretty much the worst thing that we can potentially do. And the first, you know, problem of it is the European nation states and their histories. I mean, what are European nation histories? It's something that we are combating against for the last 30, 40 odd years. We're trying to destroy the national histories. We're waging, you know, sometimes won something, lost war against educational ministries to throw away all those useless books that, you know, make children learn the national history. We're in the forest of the fight against the demon that appeared in the mid-19th century in a very, very, you know, odd, but kind of most true historiographic tradition that basically clipped off a certain political entities from the context of what was European history, now then reified a set of heroes or events as being unique and then made our national histories. But our national histories are really aberration of writing history, as they are what history shouldn't be. And most of, more often than not, they're distorting entirely our ability to actually comprehend any historical process or any process whatsoever, yes? Whether it would be related to migrations, lives, only social, political or cultural event that happens in Europe. Now, do we really want to copy it to China? We might rather think twice. Well, you know, but that is sometimes, that is happening. I mean, how many of you have seen those new beautifully published, I don't know, the seven volume, Sichuan history, whatever volume, Yunnan histories, or beautiful or large or full of information, all of them you find in libraries, you know, about Chinese studies, which means we're basically within a process of replicating the same, yes? The same process for writing local history in a very different political context. Other what is connected to this velocity is the repetition. Now, you know, once you have it in China and you're all conscious about this cultural drill of everything, yes? There's the opera drill, there is the, I don't know, whatever, my, no, any area has its own gazetteers, multi-volume gazetteers, and many, and all of you probably know that random, that if you get by the border areas, you appear, there appear only repetitions, yes? The Yunnan to Sichuan, the Sichuan to Hubei, you know, once you get there, you just repeat the same content about culture, about developments, about politics, about whatever else, because that's creating the pseudo-national provincial histories simply doubles the information, but then distorts the real connection between the people. Something which we always know, that people cross the border, they don't care about administrative borders, if they're not prohibited to do so, yes? So the production of this kind of sources, again, as in case of national histories in Europe, or in case comes from a certain political arrangement over space and over-living people to which you just enforce certain units and double on information which without any logical connection to one another. The other thing that goes on with this is the idea of, well, you know, okay, so we say, well, provinces make no sense. This is a point made ages ago, you know, they're none of the unit. I mean, this is a point makes a long time ago by Mark Alvin in the historical Atlas of China publication from mid-1980s. He said, well, you know, these provinces simply are just administrative units, yes? They've been just created that and they have no history. There is nothing natural about them, yes? As if there was something natural about European nation states or any other states. But, you know, so this kind of Alvin's points extremely radical, but we should always keep it in mind, you know, maybe not as a point, but as a question, yes? We should question the kind of spaces we are discussing. And, well, you know, and aren't Chinese provinces anything natural? Well, you know, yes and no, many of them exist for around 500 years. Most of them came out during the UN dynasty in a bit of a different settings as they, by themselves, so they have a very long history. If this exists as a certain socioeconomic entities, they did exist as a political bodies, you know, changeable political bodies historically, but we can say that for at least 500 years, most of the provinces do exist on the map and represent some kind of organization of the society in question. So, aren't they a natural organization? Well, nothing is a natural organization in case of human existence, so we can just, you know, brush this point aside. Now, you know, looking at this, however, what is more important than thinking about provinces as just kind of entities, it's thinking how deep does it go? Is it a more interactive way? So if we talk about this unit that exists for 500 years, we should not think about that they formulate a certain entities, but how do they glue with other units that are underneath? Where they functionally existing forms of social organizations? As in short, how did they relate to other forms of government, methods of marketing, circulation goods of people and so on and so on? If that thing occurs, then we can actually already identify that this sort of unit exists. And, you know, if you look at China, you know, some of them did, some of them not, some are more centric, some are less centric. If you think about who they, you know, everything comes out to the one confluence of Han River and the Yangtze River. But if you're looking up toward Guangzhou, you would see that there are very separate spots that are going out. There's a Guangdong province, yeah? So there's a Guangzhou, there's Shantou and so on. So each of them face and have a basically independent self-existence. So, you know, the diversity should be our key. And the last thing is that, you know, many of these provinces in China change their populations over these 500 years. Well, in case of, you know, some of them have been entirely destroyed. I mean, in fact, a lot of people here study Sichuan, so 92% of population lost to the Yuan Dynasty against 70% lost. It would mean transition. I mean, but this is a story that's quite repetitive. Not only just massacres, death, epidemics, whatever else you mentioned, but also migration, in-migration, out-migration, you know, large changes in population, large ecological transformation over this period. All of them impact very much how it all work. And, you know, last velocity that comes to my mind, obviously when talking about it, is the velocity of more even of the ethnicity. You know, we have this notion which we'll talk about that in eight and a second ago. So, Chu hua mi zhe, yeah, so the Chinese, the notion of Chinese nation gets smiles on the faces. But, you know, that gives a sense of ethnic unity which supposed to exist 5,000 years, though I'm not updated, maybe now 6,000 years, you know, you never know longer and longer in history. But then again, you know, we get to a certain problem of historicity, of ethnicity and historicity, of identities and culture, which obviously do not correspond to any of the geographical or political geographical units. Yes, I mean, as historians, we see the transition through the past and obviously any such notion would just distort our vision. That's why what they think is that once we go and look into research in history, we should be more people centric and much less geography centric. And our history should be closer. That sounds like a good old, you know, Maoism, but, you know, people, we should focus on the people, yes? People as groups of interactions as networks they build, as how they migrate, how they interact with other human units. So we, even though very often our sources are very disappointing, then the way we look at history should really very much keep in person an existing human being and not some kind of a geographical abstract. So now once we start looking more to people, we need to start defining also what we mean by the province. As we said, the province is very problematic thing, you know, we talk about geographical provinces, but that's not necessary. Provence can sometimes mean a hinterland, yes? Provence in a more colloquial word means just a place this is not belongs to the center, yes? So it can be an administrative entity as exist in China on the word of Sheng, but it can be just simply a hinterland of the city. It can be the place that is remote or is a place that exists in some kind of relationship between center and periphery, whether for perspective of economy, whether perspective of social exchanges or in migration. But when you come to China, we always have to be also somehow synthesized to the notion that the province as we use it in English is not a Chinese notion, yes? Our notion of province and this would somehow is very often missing up from scholarly discussion that, you know, a lot of discussion in many areas not only related to China studies but also to global history and so on that when we talk about province and provinciality, we very often forget of the very Roman roots of this word and we largely think of Roman settler colonialism to places like today's Provence, which has its name in the south of France or Sicily or what they called Africa, which in today's Tunisia, yes? So kind of forms of settler colonialism organized by the Roman Empire, which meant and what is more important roots, it's somehow its definition. It was a transplantation of a certain legal and social organization from the Rome, from Latio, to the provinces, to the outlying areas within the empire, which means copying the center to the peripheries. Now, once we speak about Chinese provinces or any provincial spaces, I don't think we could talk of this kind of provinces of transplantations of a core to the periphery. We rather think of a certain means of controlling the outlying elements of the empire, as Chinese provinces come out largely from the mechanism of extending control over the conquered and controlled land within the empires. And only in time they deepen up the mechanisms in which Sicily the center obtains its own mechanisms of control, safeguarding border, transferring taxes and creating a fairly similar ritual, social, cultural order which unites the elites within one's imperial space. So that is quite a large difference than the settler colonialism, which existed in the Mediterranean world during the Roman times. Other thing is that we should look at the province as in the kind of human to human network. So about the interactions that leads to institutionalization of what is a province and how these institutions shape the people. So we're talking about transferring of institutions. You know, it starts like wave one in China. So movement of a certain institutions, both inside and outside to the capital and building identities and building the provincial spaces and redefining them through interactions among people and social groups through forms of institutions. And we also should look at provinces not exactly just this administrative means of things on the map, but also as forms of networks, connections, transfers, exchanges and so on within variety of fields, whether they'll be work, whether they'll be knowledge, whether that will be music, performance, genres, objects, whatever else you name. Yes, so we have to look, if you want to look at people in the center of our scholarship, we don't have to start looking at the way the people actually organize their own society, produce their interactions, produce their networks, produce the memories of it, produce certain scapes, whether it will be city scapes, whether it will be temple spaces, whether it will be religious cults and whatsoever. So thus, once we think of a province, really we should go broader than administration. We should think of a space of interaction, of complex production that happens within the historical time. And there is no uniformity, yes? This is really how it just developed and there's no simple system then of saying, well, we just study provinces and it's easy, we just line up our histories as we have it everywhere. I looked at it again, my 7 volume Sichuan history, shouldn't do that, three chin, during chin, han, and so on, does that really correspond in the way the networks, the organizations, the life within these provinces have been built? No, it rather ignores the kind of interactions that produce real historical results in the place by uniformizing and linking the history to the big national past that is not built on the basis, the notion of this past, on the basis ever derived from the place like Sichuan province or any other province, yeah? So in fact, at least in my opinion, we should have an ambition of building it up from the local sets of interactions. And at the same time, it doesn't make any sense to think of provinces as something independent. So thinking of them as some kind of independent, pseudo-nation states or replicating the mistakes of the times of the nations of national histories in which we cut off interactions in order to write for something unique. And I will later on, just in a minute, provide you some examples of how little sense it makes but that's it, okay. Why is it so important? Well, because we want our histories to be relevant, yes? So not only relatively true and touching at least with a historical truth that we can derive from sources if something like this exists, but we also want to be able to examine the questions and want to examine the developments that happened in history. And the only way to do it is by localizing it. And only by localizing it, we can do it by looking at this broadly conceived idea of a province, whether it can be. That means that, well, perhaps we shouldn't, it doesn't mean that we have to do micro histories though. Micro histories is not the solution, not so easy. Or what they called historical anthropology. That was the method. For China, it was called historical anthropology in China because of David and the way the grant authorities in Hong Kong work. Whereas, we're really talking here about micro histories. We shouldn't jump into micro history thinking that we got a golden solution for everything. Micro history is historians pretending to be anthropologists but playing with books. And it's very interesting, but at the same time, it also might ended up us cutting out our little piece and our case studies and reifying it way beyond its actual meaning. Okay. So, so many fallacies that I have listed to you in here are fallacies of repeating the bad historiographic traditions that didn't help us, the fallacies of, you know, of reifying the provinces or the ones of, you know, wrongly defined topics or the ones of, you know, the way things don't really work. Unless you could hear my solution to it would be that for looking at networks in interaction. So, I'll give you some examples from Sichuan. London, if you see it, is this lovely city in the northern Sichuan, you know, not few western tourists go there. The most Sichuanist tourists travel, you know, it's preserved in approximately 60 something percent as it comes to its original architecture from the mid-dine from largely from the Qing dynasty, mostly 18th century, bombed by the Japanese in a certain moment but without large destruction. Certain elements have been reconstruction, not the tower, this one, from which I took this picture, but this other tower has been freshly reconstructed. But largely the city stands as it is. Now, London is famous for its local hero. And the local hero is Jean-Pierre Nureau. It was the place where, you know, the freaking double hero, Jean-Pierre, has resided, that's where he, you know, fought, you know, large battles and proof, it's everything. And that's where his grave, at least historically, but obviously there comes two products that are all trying to accessible with Jean-Pierre Nureau and I lost my picture at Jean-Pierre Pijol, which we can only consume locally. Now, apart from lovely cuisine and the thing, you know, you have an example of this hero. Now, this is very, very particular. I give you some pictures initially and then I talk about it. This is a very particular local quote, religious quote, around the grave of Jean-Pierre. So this lovely temple, you know, which you enter is actually very well preserved and taken care of for. It has a, you know, a kind of a fearsome status of Jean-Pierre. It's, you know, this is the guy that came to your swimming, you know, by the side. So, you know, at least you can know something about your future, which is dire. And, you know, but you have, you know, this main thing, yes, so his uprightness is being driven. So, you know, a normal person sort of that height. So, another set of statues in front of which you can, you know, take a picture of a kid with this lovely little element as you see here of people's hellish figures smashing your face, which is good for children education, as we all know. And behind it is this mouth, which is according to a tradition, a grave of Jean-Pierre. So Jean-Pierre stands as a local hero for London. It's apart from food production, beer production, whatever else, you know, it has its own forms of historical religious cult, which obviously it's not from the third century AD, but, you know, stretches largely, we would say, around Qing Dynasty is being activated. Most of those monuments are part, obviously, for the grave that is historical date somewhere from the, you know, Kanshi Tianan period, where the renovations of temples mostly occurred in this area. And, you know, this is something also with many people who are from outside Sichuan or even outside, you know, they, by each one, would not have been here about whereas people in London and this area would very much know and identify the place with Jean-Pierre. Now, in which way Jean-Pierre is a local hero or an exemplar of something like local history? If you focus on him solely and exclusively as an element of the local history, you end up in exactly in that place where you would not understand anything or actually understand everything wrongly. Jean-Pierre, you know, figure that, you know, relates to the very, not only very broad narrative tradition history of China, but also a historical figure never born in that area, existing for a limited time, you know, whose, you know, very memory and existence have been produced to belong to that space most probably through narrative tradition and its reviving and building monuments to what is a memory of the past, then to the actual presence of some grave. I mean, nobody ever dug up this grave. So, you know, we don't know if he actually is there or it's not there because it's quite controversial or obviously to dig in the graves and also very problematic from the perspective of archaeological works if you want to damage. So understanding John Faye as a local, so this is exactly the place where the local meets we would call it national, is it not national or is it certain cultural realm that is, you know, considered time as where a very broader element gets localized within a particular space where they have their own life and local impact where we through them we can understand how this sort of very provincial reality can live and what is an element of a provincial culture that actually is very deeply embedded into the broader sets of traditions that make up what we can talk this sort of corpus of Chinese traditions. And here I'm consciously using the word of corpus instead of a word Chinese cultural, Chinese civilization, which would be very French if you call it a civilization. It's always happens, but you know, but I rather come to the sets of elements that are not necessarily very much connected to each other but that coexist to the other and came out to different strengths of this tradition. Yes, elements in corpus don't have to be in a clear relation to one another. And that's very much, you know, at least for me allows me very much to understand how a broad and long tradition can live, yes? And so obviously then looking at John Faye, and this is not, you know, John Faye is just one example, but I could give you, you know, Du Jiang Yen's, you know, the story of Arlang Li Bing, yeah? So another Arlang, the famous black-faced god, you know, which is a very ferocious, you know, cultural hero in some way and very much connected to Li Bing, which is the official of the Qin dynasty that created a whole dam system that divided split rivers and then provided irrigation to the Chengdu plain and started the Chengdu tradition. You could also use this kind of example, yes? So Li Bing, Arlang, you know, they get mixed together, you know, within a very complex, a bit obscure cultural tradition in these very important works of empire building by the Qin dynasty, yes? And they have both the very local faces and the one that integrate them into broader unity of the country. And I think from us as a historian, this kind of example exactly points us to the difficulty of studying provincial histories in China, but then I could leave China and start throwing you examples from European history of exactly the same quality, yes? Where the networks element of history may overwhelm, in fact, the local particularity. However, nothing in human activity is not local, yes? We only exist in one place in one time, yes? So we need to keep that balances. Well, the second example for which I don't have pictures before we move to one of the pictures is the one coming from Sichuan opera because I spent so much time troubling myself with Sichuan opera. It does that know a little bit about it, know that 70% of the scripts in music comes from the tradition which is called gao qiang, yes, gao like five, yes? So we can qiang, we can call it as a tune, as a voice, as a set of melodies. Well, there is a very big problem with gao qiang and this is the one where that entirely damages much of the writing of province-centered histories of opera music or Chinese performers of tradition or tradition in general. And one of these problems that gao qiang does not originate from Sichuan, it originates from Jiangxi, borderline ahue. It comes with the migrations, different migrations because so many of the opera tunes and opera tune traditions anyway under the yi yang qiang or gao qiang migrate northwards and along the westwards, with migration of people. So we can see these Jiangxi traditions influencing both what later on in its history grew up as northern tradition of opera and later on south of it from other mixed incomes, Beijing opera, but gao qiang moves along the yang qiang with migration of people and ended up being in Sichuan. It brings with itself a set of scripts but also a particular way of music, it's largely percussion and singing, yes? It comes with also certain dialectical twists. The one that ends up in Sichuan and builds it up into Sichuan opera comes from Guang. So again, we've already jumped three provinces as two regions, three provinces, but it is a real somehow a story. So how local then is gao qiang to Sichuan? Well, it obviously is because it is later on, obviously in the 20th century on the, it's integrated as the musical troops started singing in different tunes, the five tunes to Sichuan opera and simply Sichuan opera troops when Sichuan opera appeared in the early 20th century, when it commercialized started to sing in all the five tunes and 70% of the script was gao qiang. And it was much closer to the ones which is sung in Hubei and Hunan. And that's where we get to all sort of problems. Wait, are we talking here about classifications of opera so centric as to the performance culture of China, the Chinese culture? Or can we sweep away these provincial names and start talking about people? So let's sweep them away. And then you think of a big migration from 17, late 17th century, there flows people along the Yangtze and the population of rather depleted Hunan, Hubei areas and later on Sichuan get also colonized by people speaking and singing because they organize religious festivals or press in a particular dialects. Yes, they called it gao qiang because it was high pitched kind of voice with a percussion. These people typically settled in Sichuan. They settled in there at the end in the villages where next to people who they knew. Yes, and they circulated their traditions with the growing and growing in decades and decades communities among the people they knew who could speak that kind of a language. And at the same time, enjoy this kind of opera, the stories related to opera and the stories to the religious holds to the gods. This opera was celebrating. And so we ended up with a horror for somebody who loves provincial stories or getting history of China cut into provinces because it's something that entirely breaks up all the borders and shows you how through language, through travel, through movement of images of culture, in fact, you have certain integrated realms along the routes of transportations and networks of people. In this case, riverine networks that brought people along the Yangtze to repopulate Sichuan and then spread around along main rivers in the China. And so, you know, so we just crossed out particularity of religious cults, no particular culture, particularly of local dialect and tradition out. Well, at least Sichuan has to have something to be focused on it. Let's say warlords, oh, Sichuan warlords. Yes, everybody loves Sichuan warlords. Sichuan warlords mostly came from the family, from your family. Yes, the famous yos of Sichuan, all of them settled in this lovely city, Da'i, is the big county, and in Da'i, there is a small town called An'ren. Yeah, it's kind of south of Chengdu. If those who goes to Chengdu haven't gone there, you'll have fun. Now, so what's up with the yos? Here's the elder of the yos, had the modest house. Here he was, yes, in Zhongxian. He had three sons. Those three sons have been slightly more fertile, so they had more sons and more sons and more. Of the most famous of them, those that love is Liu and Hui, Liu and Cai, and their younger cousin, Liu Xiang, even though he was an younger by age, but it's just how it came on. Now Liu Xiang, yeah, yeah, you should see the arrow. Now Liu Xiang has been the warlord of Chongqing for most of his career. He sat on the city of Chongqing, like a spider on the middle of the web, and because it has been the main source of transporting opium, so nicely produced Sichuan, and so prolifically consumed all around China, so his purse was never empty. And now these two guys had other stories, Liu and Cai and Liu and Hui, and one of them became basically kind of a viceroy of Xikang, and it's very close to what you guys study, so Khan Xikang, where he built his own Leluyiniaans on the capital and lived there happily ever after. And not really, because then there came a communist revolution, and he deflected to the communists. The previous guys, Wencai and Liu Xiang, had a happiness of dying before the communist revolution, whereas the brother, if he's actually deflected to communists in the last moment, handed up the province, became a general of the communist army, became a celebrated hero of China, and died in 1976 in a hospital, 76 or 70, I don't remember, in a hospital in Beijing of all the age after splendid career on top positions, meaningless, but top positions within the People's Republic. He never lost his crown. Now, the family has, you cannot see this, largely conceived on that bed, was all these large children, and so the first of them, the one who's ruler of Tibet, it has this very lovely view now. So just as first I show pictures, I tell you what I want to tell about him. So it is he being a, Wenhuai, yes, your Wenhuai, the one of Xikang, he had this lovely palace with beautiful classical and neoclassical kind of 1930s China, makes things, there's even his sculpture, sitting with his wife and happily watching opera being played for them as an entertain themselves. He had this double room, so one room, just one next to another, has elements of a traditional Chinese household where he consulted on important issues and in order to take care of their motherland here, sure, and in other on the couch, he was sitting under the shining star of the chairman Mao. And now the other villas, that this is the ones belonging, as far as I remember to Yuxiang, it was slightly more modest, and this one where you enter along to the Yuxiang Wenhuai, who is exactly the same kind of warlord and all the others of his cousins and brothers, but he depicted himself as one from the flock of the tigers. I guess it's him and his brother, as the one that was a good communist as well supposedly. And this, you know, it's deep devotion to republicanism of every sort in China, so elegantly managed to use a bit of elements of modern sculpture addition to a classical art. And it's very interesting and I'll talk about it. If you look at this villas, it mixes classical Chinese palace with a European villas. So it absolutely mixes different elements, as you see in a way that is familiar to anybody who likes to visit sites from this period. So obviously, you know, it's very neo-traditional, but at the end, and I'll come back to it, his villa became unsaved during Cultural Revolution because it was filled with a gigantic sculpture of the evil warlords. And this is this very large sculpture composition, much larger than this room, showing how warlords here is surrounded by his cronies. It's, you know, taking from people their wealth and you see the anger of the righteous masses that they would stand up and do what Mao Zedong said, not only when you equip them with guns and pumps, then the revolution can happen. So if any of you harbor any needs for upturning social order, you know, the chairman told you that you need a certain tools to do it, and then it all works just fine. And so Leo's, yeah. But then, you know, you'd think that standing Leo's of UNRAN, you know, that was their ancestral ground, they would be very local, yes? And you know, these are the Sichuan warlords, the famous Sichuan warlords, the guy that came out of a big flag Sichuan for the Sichuanese, you know, they held to their power, they actually managed to kick away many of the official, specialist merchants and so on, who came from different regions of China in the 1920s, promoting locals for this sort of local nationalism. So here you have finally your nationalist hero, if not a little problem, but one of them was ruling Shikha. And it was equally locally nationalistic to Shikha, that, you know, he lived in agreement with local come warlords, as local warlords, in order to build a local, Tibetan, Shikhangish kind of nationalism that was presided by this Han warlord from the Leo family. So already this argument is being somewhere another, damn it. Also, Leo's have exhibited a great flexibility. They never really cared about localism. Localism only served the other purpose, getting to power. It was a great way to build their, you know, fortune. So they, their fortress land, but it was an amazing way than to enter into the mainstream of Chinese politics. All of them became, you know, a vote nationalists. Leo Xiang, somehow had some accident in 1938 and it didn't work for him. And so, but, you know, Chongqing was too important, but generally, and then he became one of them at least the only surviving one became a communist. So it has never been about Sichuan. It has never been localism. It's always been about power, right? And every single piece of their projection and the pro as a family project is a project of us upstart careerists and not of somebody who represents anything about Sichuan or any other place. Also just looking at them as the local phenomenon, you know, obscures our rights. I mean, which other families of this period were like this? The Jiangs, the ones from the Jiangjieshe, Zhang Kaisheng. Oh, they're very much upstarts. The songs, very much intermarried with, you know, the Song family, and that had so much. The guys like Jiang Zhulin and so on from Manchuria, they weren't like this. The Guangxi League guys weren't like this. All of them have been like, Lidong Ren wasn't like this, led the president of China. You know, all this localism at the end served various games. So it's just a place of multiple identities and using identities by very conscious players in order to get themselves up. Now, what's about the landlordism? I've heard so much about the Chinese, the Sichuan is landlordism, and Sichuan is warlordism being the most exploitative. You know, you get all the kind of ridiculous figures of how much taxes they extracted, which they did. But also in other areas of China, that time in many other historical periods, different rulers, if they could, did extract as much as they could. And so this figure of the even landlord place in the cultural revolution, you know, so much has been made of it. It's just because it was so good for the particular campaign. It was such a recognizable figure, and it was so easy. And his gigantic villa stood there in the moment of particular campaign. Now, you know, and it's even... So what can you say about them? Really, they were just magnets. As you've seen from Michel and Q, their palaces, their style and life was not like this, but was like this. It resembled in all ways and manners, if you travel to place like Taiping in Guangdong province, you know, where all the rich Huaciao overseas Chinese people were building their villas. If you visit China through that perspective, you'll see Shanghai and so on. How much have you seen it? It's really a kind of a cosmopolitan class that was using a certain objects, material objects, in order to show their own position. And that position required particular purchases and looks. And they've done it so similar to the guys from Caiping in their own places where their clan residence was, their own, you know, the homeland of the particular family, and not in the place where they really resided, whether it would be Beijing, whether it would be Shanghai, whether it would be Chongqing. And so this is really embellishing, embellishing the place where you live. So after even destroying the Sichuan warlords as a form of localism, let's move to conclusions. I think what can the provincial history be? Because I think I gave you enough proof and examples that provincial history is in troubles. And we cannot obviously just trash all the classical handbook-style histories. They're useful. If you pick your seven volumes of Sichuan history, whatever volume you need on history, or whatever other local history, it's useful. It has data. We need them. It's not that they are by themselves evil and that we should never look at them and you should start a little campaign against them. Not so much. I mean, these are handbooks which serve a certain purpose, but they don't belong very much to the tradition of analytical history. And we need to look at them with a large, not a grain of salt, but a track lock of salt, yes? And in order to us to see how this data can then be fed in a much broader analytical network in which we really research what people did. But we obviously cannot have everything in one place. So I think that generally, if you think about any kind of provincial history or history that is more local, we should first of all look, we should look how people network, even though they're local and if they're formed locally and they act locally, we should look at the way these people network outside and beyond the administrative networks within they exist. How they interact across the border and how their life is shaped and not how administrative borders form their lives. So we should turn the picture, not look at them, let's say, I don't know, life in Hubei, but a human who acts from there, yes? So the Hubei shouldn't be a limit by kind of information that provides us with context. We should be very much sensitive to transfer to networks, to contacts, to circulations and the various usages of local environments. And especially, so we shouldn't think that the environment is the formative, easy explanation, but the way people interact with those various elements of their social, environmental, geographical and political contacts. Because if you lose from sight, the real action of people within it will just be replicating the history written by administrators or some kind of chopped up data that exists within the administration. If we focus on a bigger topic than just people, something like a defined space, a village, a city, a county or even a whole province, yes, we should not lose from sight the existence of the broader world beyond it, yes? The cities and also the comparative scales. As we had a moment in writing Chinese history or writing city history or Suzhou history, Shanghai history, lot of Chengdu histories and so on and so on. The problem is that if you get all this history now side by side, you'd see that very often to just say the same history. And this is where the problems start arising. If they speak about very simple, similar histories, then perhaps there's something wrong in writing this kind of history. Maybe this should be a much more interactive history or much more problem-based history or maybe this unit as a city does not really help us at all because those units should be very much questioned. If you look at the institutions of social life, such as temples, festivals, rituals, why even food habit? And we should not give to a false dream of uniqueness. And that's uniqueness that very often comes from the wrong mix of anthropology and history, yes? A wrong, what I mean by the wrong mix is that you use the anthropological methods in order to get a very in-depth study of something, but I'm finishing in one minute. And then I know you're haunting on me. But then at the end, we miss the fact that the cult can be so pro-regional, we miss that the cult exists in a various context or simply that can exist even outside of country because social functions that underline the cult can exist even beyond a particular culture. And that's what we should also ask ourselves if something would happen in Chinese temple, resembles what something would happen in a Catholic church, maybe we shouldn't pervert the topic, what is in this temple, but think about why people perform something and ask a different set of question to understand what we actually see. So I would say that the province is a provincial history can be a first subject, but it's a subject that requires a lot of context, a subject that requires us to have a very much open eyes about cultural, social, geographic and political, environmental issues that are connected to it. And the one where we should be very much aware that if we look at it, we're not gonna find provincialism or we also not gonna suddenly discover the holy grail of unique history that nobody has ever written or something that would give us the sense of pristine localism and then which then might seem as a truer or other view on history. That things typically don't happen as we are social creatures and we always exist in context of us. Thank you.