Mapping a Fluid Border: Shifting Territorial Control along the Huai River
My research focuses on the Huai River, an atypical internal frontier in China. Between the eighth and fourteenth centuries, this region underwent major environmental, political, and cultural transformations, suggesting that the Huai was not merely a river, but a space in which multiple forms of historical change became visible. Because these changes were fundamentally spatial, temporal, and historically layered, digital mapping offers an effective means of tracing the changing historical geography of the Huai region. My fellowship project uses digital mapping to investigate one dimension of this longer history: the Huai River as a political frontier between the Southern Song (1127–1279) and Jin (1115–1234) dynasties. Although the river often served as their main borderline, recurrent warfare and and competing claims over land meant that actual zones of control remained fluid and did not always coincide with the river itself. Rather than representing this border as a single fixed line, I will create temporally layered digital maps tracing how territorial configurations changed across time. To construct these maps, I will curate a pilot dataset of approximately 500 records drawn primarily from digitized Classical Chinese texts, extracting and georeferencing place names, waterways, regional terms, and evidence of political control while linking each record to dates and source metadata. Published historical maps will serve as base layers, while gazetteers, place-name dictionaries, and regional geographical scholarship will help identify locations and document spatial uncertainty. By integrating evidence from different sources within a shared spatial framework, these digital maps will reveal changes that conventional static maps tend to obscure, particularly the tension between the river as a formal boundary and the surrounding frontier as a fluid and contested political space.