Susan Naquin works on the social and cultural history of late imperial and early modern China (1400-1900). She earned her B.A. from Stanford (1966), Ph.D. in History from Yale (1974), and taught at the University of Pennsylvania between 1977 and 1992. She came to Princeton in 1993 as a member of both the Department of History and Department of East Asian Studies. She has been Professor Emerita since 2013.

Professor Naquin has written about millenarian peasant uprisings, families and rituals, pilgrimages, temples, and the history of Beijing. She is the author of Gods of Mount Tai: Familiarity and the Material Culture of North China, 1000-2000 (2022), which was awarded the Association for Asian Studies Levenson Prize in 2024 for the best book on China Before 1900, as well as Millenarian Rebellion in China: The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813 (1976), Shantung Rebellion: The Wang Lun Uprising of 1774 (1981), and Peking: Temples and City Life, 1400-1900 (2000); the coauthor with Evelyn Rawski of Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century (1987); and the coeditor with Chün-fang Yü of Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China (1992).

Current Research

Professor Naquin dabbles in the history of collecting, but her research interests continue to be on material culture and artisanal technologies within the religious world of northern China in the Ming and Qing periods.

Selected Articles

“The Material Manifestations of Regional Culture.” Journal of Chinese History 3:2 (2019) 1-17.

Evelyn Rawski and Susan Naquin. “A New Look at the Canton Trade, 1700-1845: A Review Essay.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 78:2 (2018) 491-514.

“Paul Houo 霍明志, A Dealer in Antiquities in Early Twentieth Century Peking.” Études chinoises XXXIV-2 (2015) 203-244.

“Temples, Technology, and Material Culture in Shouzhou 壽州, Anhui.” Pages 185-207 in Cultures of Knowledge: Technology in Chinese History. Edited by Dagmar Schäfer. Leiden: Brill, 2012.

“Giuseppe Castiglione/Lang Shining 郎世寧: A Review Essay.” T’oung Pao 95 (2009) 393-412.

“Mapping Peking: Cartographic Technology and Empires East and West,” pp. 264-269 in Skatte fra kejserens Kina:Den Forbudte By og Det Danske Kongehus/Treasures from Imperial China: The Forbidden City and the Royal Danish Court/Zhongguo zhi meng: Zijincheng he Danmai gongting 中國之夢: 紫禁城和丹麥宮廷. Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Sølvkammer, 2006.

“The Forbidden City Goes Abroad: Qing History and the Foreign Exhibitions of the Palace Museum, 1974-2004." T’oung Pao 90:4-5 (2004) 342-397.

“Sites, Saints, and Sights at the Tanzhe Monastery," Cahiers d'Extrême Asie 10 (1998) 183-211.

“The Transmission of White Lotus Sectarianism in Late Imperial China," pp. 255-291 in Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, edited by D. Johnson, A.J. Nathan, and E. Rawski. Berkeley: University of California, 1985.