Nov 10 | IRS Series | By Mule and by River: Mapping Trade Hubs, Caravan Routes, and Lanten Yao Manuscript Circulation in the Upper Mekong Region, 1890–1910 by Dr Joseba Estevez

Nov 10 | IRS Series | By Mule and by River: Mapping Trade Hubs, Caravan Routes, and Lanten Yao Manuscript Circulation in the Upper Mekong Region, 1890–1910 by Dr Joseba Estevez Interdisciplinary Research Seminar By Mule and by River: Mapping Trade Hubs, Caravan Routes, and Lanten Yao Manuscript Circulation in the Upper Mekong Region, 1890–1910 Dr Joseba Estevez The University of Hong Kong Abstract The highlands of the Southeast Asian Massif and adjacent Southwest China constitute one of the most persistent geographies of ignorance in the human sciences — quartered between competing area studies disciplines, divided by postcolonial sovereign borders, and silenced by archives that encode colonial and dynastic optics while systematically excluding highland perspectives. This presentation takes the measure of that gap for the Upper Mekong borderlands during the period 1890–1910, a moment when British and French imperial rivalry over access to Yunnan's markets sent successive survey missions through terrain already structured by centuries of indigenous commerce. Drawing on the diaries and survey reports of French and British explorers alongside Yao oral traditions and written records, the presentation reconstructs overland and riverine trade networks, identifies key commercial hubs, and maps the active circulation of peoples and commodities across the borderlands converging on Luang Namtha, North Laos — a regional node whose historical significance has been largely invisible in the existing literature. Colonial and indigenous sources are read as complementary archives: the former documenting the infrastructure of movement from the outside; the latter testifying to its social and textual life from within. Two contributions anchor the argument. The first is a new cartographic reconstruction of trade routes, hubs, and commodity flows — mules, silver, opium, cotton, salt, and compressed tea — that surfaces a borderland the Yunnan Myth rendered invisible. The second is a previously untranslated Lanten Yao treatise on equine maladies and remedies (1846 or 1906) that ended its journey in Luang Namtha, testifying materially to a moment when horses were indispensable to highland mobility. That the treatise carries an explicit injunction restricting its own circulation reveals the social logic governing the movement of knowledge along these routes: manuscripts traveled the same circuits as commodities, with their restricted exchange encoding the value, vulnerability, and social stakes of the networks this presentation seeks to recover. About the Speaker Dr. Joseba Estevez is a social anthropologist and Research Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HKU). His historical research reconstructs the commercial and manuscript circulation networks of the Southeast Asian Massif, tracing the overland and riverine trade routes, caravan economies, and textual exchanges that connected Southwest China, northern Laos, Burma, Vietnam, and Thailand across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This work draws on colonial survey reports, indigenous oral traditions, and a corpus of Lanten Yao manuscripts written in Classical Chinese script — among the richest surviving textual records produced by any highland society in the region. Over more than a decade of fieldwork in Luang Namtha Province, northern Laos, Estevez worked directly with Lanten Yao (Mun) communities whose Daoist ritual specialists preserved and transmitted texts along the same caravan routes that carried silver, opium, cotton, and horses across the borderlands. His research on Lanten Yao ritual expertise earned the 2024 Frobenius Research Award, the premier honor for anthropological scholarship in the German-speaking world. He leads the YAO DAO Project at HKU and has directed major archival initiatives — including the Digital Library of the Lanten Textual Heritage (British Library, 2015–2021; Heidelberg 2023; Leiden 2027) — mapping Daoist manuscript exchange networks across the nineteenth-century Southeast Asian Massif. Date/Time: 10/11/2026 12:30-13:30 Venue: Rm 201, May Hall or via Zoom Organized by: Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences

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