Time is basic to human consciousness and action, yet paradoxically historians rarely ask how it is understood, manipulated, recorded, or lived. Cataclysmic events in particular disrupt and realign the dynamics of temporality among people. For historians, the temporal effects of such events on large polities such as empires--the power projections of which always involve the dictation of time--are especially significant. This important and intriguing volume is an investigation of precisely such temporal effects, focusing on the northern and eastern regions of the Asian subcontinent in the seventeenth century, when the polity at the core of East Asian civilization, Ming-dynasty China, collapsed and was replaced by the Manchu-ruled Qing dynasty.