Sining Lyu

Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History

School of Oriental and African Studies,

University of London

658410@soas.ac.uk

About Me

I am a historian of Qing China, a final year Ph.D. candidate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, submitting in December 2025. My work lies at the intersection of medicine, empire, and state-making. I study the role of infectious diseases in shaping imperial governance, fiscal architecture, and social life in Qing borderlands and inner provinces. My research asks what it meant to be governed, protected, or abandoned, through medical regimes, epidemic containment, and imperial rationalities, in Qing China.

My Phd Dissertation, Infectious Disease and Empire in Late Imperial Qing China offers the first comprehensive study of how infectious disease shaped state formation in the Qing Empire, from its rise on the northeastern frontier to its collapse in the early twentieth century. The Manchus were the only ruling group in early modern world history to conquer a territory where they lacked immunological resistance to local diseases such as smallpox. As a comparatively vulnerable population, they nevertheless forged the second-largest contiguous land empire in world history after the Mongols and laid the territorial foundations of modern China. How did they confront infectious disease? What strategies did they devise for survival, governance, and emotional endurance amid repeated epidemics? How did they respond when plague struck their homeland once again at the empire’s end?

Drawing on previously unexamined Manchu-language sources, this dissertation reconstructs a political, social, and emotional history of disease in the Qing world. It shifts the history of epidemics in China from the margins to the heart of imperial governance, emotional life, and statecraft. This project is the first to systematically analyze Manchu-language archives to investigate how the Qing state conceptualized, recorded, and managed infectious disease. I have compiled an integrated database of Manchu and Chinese sources on disease, encompassing over 400 Manchu-language memorials and 200 Chinese-language legal and administrative documents. Through these sources, I reconstruct the Qing’s strategies of epidemic control: quarantine, vernacularisation, and even the invention of wartime disease protocols, within the broader logic of Qing governance.

Infectious disease is a universal condition of human existence. Yet once public health became institutionalized within the administrative structures of the modern state, the body itself became a site of governance. Rights were subordinated to risk. Epidemic control, no longer merely a matter of science or medicine, became a field of political contestation. The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare these dynamics anew: divergent national strategies, shaped by historically rooted anxieties and political rationalities, demonstrate that epidemic governance is always also an expression of political culture.

Scholarship on the history of disease in China has largely drawn upon Chinese-language materials. While studies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have incorporated Western medical accounts, most historians of Chinese medicine have lacked training in Manchu: a UNESCO-designated endangered language taught at only a handful of institutions worldwide, including SOAS. Existing research in Manchu has tended to focus on pharmacology or natural history, leaving the political and administrative dimensions of epidemic governance underexplored. Nor have scholars addressed the broader effects of disease on imperial structures, frontier dynamics, and social life.

Contrary to earlier scholars such as Carol Benedict and Florence Bretelle-Establet, I argue that the Qing state did not remain passive in the face of disease. It actively engaged in disease management through flexible, regionally adaptive approaches. Local officials and military generals employed diverse strategies without heavy-handed regulation from the center, reflecting the empire’s core principle of “unity in diversity.” Just as the emperor projected different ruling images to different elite constituencies, so too did imperial disease policy vary by region and social context. In Mongol territories, legal codes required compensation for spreading infection; in inland provinces, deaths caused by infectious disease were adjudicated under homicide law.

This study also uncovers how infectious disease intersected with frontier politics, diplomacy, and imperial warfare. Epidemics frequently served as a pretext for intelligence operations along the Inner Asian borderlands. The Qing leveraged its immunological advantage against smallpox in military campaigns against the Dzungars, integrating biological strategy into imperial expansion. Smallpox inoculation became not just a public health measure but a weapon of war.

Epidemics, however, did not discriminate. They devastated elites and commoners alike: killing Mongol taijis, Kazakh khans’ heirs, and imperial relatives. These losses triggered fear, regret, and, at times, violence. The Ministry of Justice records cases where grief over epidemic death escalated into social unrest. The Qing court responded with efforts to safeguard the emotional and physical security of tributary envoys, many of whom lacked smallpox immunity. Yet despite quarantine efforts, failures had lasting geopolitical consequences. The death of the Sixth Panchen Lama from smallpox not only ruptured Tibet’s religious-political hierarchy but also helped precipitate the Gurkha invasion.

The empire’s final decades further reveal its commitment to modern epidemic control. When the second outbreak of bubonic plague struck Manchuria in 1900, the Qing court and banner generals adopted cutting-edge scientific protocols introduced by Dr. Wu Liande. They harnessed bacteriology not only to halt the epidemic but also to defend Manchuria’s sovereignty and economic position. In the shadow of collapse, the Qing state demonstrated both resolve and adaptation in epidemic governance. This project illuminates the entanglement of disease, emotion, and governance in the Qing Empire. It offers a new perspective on how early modern states confronted biological vulnerability, and how the management of illness became a central feature of imperial rule.

Research Interests

Education

Ph.D. in History, SOAS, University of London (2021–2025)
 Thesis: Infectious Disease and Empire in Late Imperial Qing China
 Supervisors: Dr. Lars Laamann, Prof. Andrea Janku

M.A. in History (High Merit), SOAS, University of London (2020–2021)
 Thesis: Women Can Do: National Women’s Organizations in Shanghai, 1912–1937
 (To be submitted to Women’s History Review)
 Supervisor: Prof. Andrea Janku

B.A. in History, Mount Holyoke College (2016–2020)
 Thesis: From Reality to Legend: Religious Impact on Changing Narratives of Human Sacrifice in Dynastic China
 Supervisor: Prof. Daniel Gardner, Smith College

Academic Appointments

Assistant Research Fellow, Shanghai Normal University (2024–2025)
 Project: Academic Traditions and Social Change from the Mid-Eighteenth to the Late Twentieth Century

Languages and Research Tools

Referees

Dr. Lars Laamann
 Senior Lecturer, History, SOAS | ll10@soas.ac.uk

Prof. Andrea Janku
 Professor of History, SOAS | aj7@soas.ac.uk

Dr. Shabnum Tejani
 Senior Lecturer, History, SOAS | st40@soas.ac.uk