Tracking and Contextualizing Kang Youwei in Exile: A Workshop on Diversifying Primary Sources and Collaboration, Association of Asian Studies, March 2025

Wan Zhaoyuan, Robert L. Worden and Jane Leung Larson

Robert L. Worden and Jane Leung Larson, the primary co-authors of A Chinese Reformer in Exile (Leiden: Brill, 2025), presented a workshop at the Association of Asian Studies, Columbus, Ohio, on March 13, 2025. Kang scholar Wan Zhaoyuan, author of Science and the Confucian Religion of Kang Youwei, led discussion with the audience. 

We illustrated how opening scholarly collaboration beyond academia and incorporating a variety of textural and non-textural primary sources enriches the construction of complex, transnational histories in Asian studies. This methodology allowed our team of six scholars to document and contextualize Kang Youwei’s fifteen years’ exile from China—particularly his extended visits and political activities in North America—and the evolution of the political organization Kang founded in Canada in 1899 to transform China’s autocratic empire into a constitutional monarchy. View the two PowerPoint presentations (in PDF form) by Worden and Larson and Wan's introductory remarks at the links below:

Wan Zhaoyuan, Introductory Remarks

Robert L. Worden, "Getting Started"

Jane Leung Larson, "From Dissertation to Collaborative Book"