Speaker Bio
Huang Chih-Yen Debby obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania after receiving her BA and MA degrees at National Taiwan University. She is currently a NSTC Research Scholar at Academia Sinica, where she serves as principal investigator of a research project funded by the National Science and Technology Council, titled Empire of Pleasure: The Art of Governing and Being Governed in Eighth-Century China. Her research lies at the intersection of institutional, cultural, and gender history in medieval China, with a focus on gender relations, public performance of emotion, and the ways institutions both enable and constrain action while also generating political and social capital. She is the author of Princess Politics: A Gendered Investigation into the Political History of Early Medieval China (2013, in Chinese; simplified Chinese edition forthcoming) and has published widely in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. Her recent article on the transcultural reception of a Buddhist tale, accepted by the Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology (2026, in Chinese). She is currently completing More Than Friends: Gender, Space, and the Making of Intimacy in Medieval China, 3rd–7th Centuries, a monograph that reconstructs how elites negotiated intimacy, trust, and social distance at the moment of first encounter with their friends’ relatives, revealing an underlying emotional order that shaped early medieval sociability.
Lecture Synopsis
How did pleasure become politically meaningful in eighth-century China? This talk reconsiders the political significance of pleasure (le) during the reign of Emperor Xuanzong (r. 712–756), challenging the long-standing assumption that indulgence signaled moral and political decline. Focusing on a series of imperial edicts issued in the latter half of Xuanzong’s reign, I show that leisure and pleasure were institutionalized through imperial edicts that restructured officials’ time: encouraging outings during holidays and off-duty hours, shortening daily service obligations, and sponsoring large-scale banquets for high officials on the outskirts of the capital on their holidays. Drawing on classical theories of qi and cosmological ideas of seasonal harmony and stimulus–response (ganying), these edicts articulated a political vision in which pleasure functioned as a sign of peace, prosperity, and benevolent rule. Enjoyment was no longer framed as excess, but as evidence of proper attunement between ruler, officials, and the cosmos. I argue that these policies cultivated a distinctive affective subjectivity among officials, who were expected to feel and perform joy and gratitude as part of political life. In this sense, pleasure became not merely an experience, but a way of knowing: a means through which governance was sensed, verified, and publicly narrated. By foregrounding pleasure as a form of political epistemology, this talk invites a rethinking of emotion, pleasure, and moral authority in High Tang rulership.
