Anthony Tong

Anthony Zihan Tong is a MA student in the Department of History. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree with Honors in History and minors in Political Science and English Literature from New York University. His Honors thesis titled “Cigarette Advertising and the Semi-Private Space in Republican China, 1927-1937” examines how European, Nationalist and Japanese actors compete for authority in public and private spaces by appealing to liberal desire, nationalist sentiment, and traditionalist virtue.

 At Stanford, he has finished two research projects, addressing the life and work of Sir Cecil Clementi, a colonial administrator in British Hong Kong and Jiang Kanghu, a former UC Berkeley professor who worked for the Wang Jingwei regime. Currently, he is working on a project that investigates the evolution and transmutation of archaeological methods and thoughts in Shaanxi province, where the Terracotta army was discovered in 1973. He wants to understand how archaeology as a modern discipline was closely intertwined with the discourse on Chinese civilization. More broadly, he is interested in intellectual history, cultural history, and history of science and technology in modern East Asia.