The purpose of this essay is threefold. First, to highlight research of Seonmin KIM, whose 2006 Ph.D. dissertation elucidates complex relationships among Ming China, Choson Korea, Tokugawa Japan, and mountainous ginsengproducing "borderlands" between Korea and China; her story concludes with the remarkable rise of a borderlands power that overthrew Ming China, thereby establishing dominance that lasted into the 20 th century -the Qing Dynasty. A second purpose is to showcase application of a

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... -standard-model -the Hydraulic Metaphor -that elucidates economic components of Professor KIM's history via visual and intuitive mechanisms designed to be understandable for non-specialists. Last, an outline of East Asian history is placed within * An early version of this essay was a keynote presentation at the 2 nd meeting of the Asian Association of World Historians at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea in May 2012. Encouragement and suggestions by Ji-Hyung CHO and Seohyung KIM, respectively Director and Research Professor, at Ewha's Institute of World and Global History are hereby acknowledged. Thanks to Professors Richard von GLAHN and SHIMADA Ryuto we eliminated a glaring error in an early draft, but of course errors and omissions that remain are our responsibility alone. 118 ASIAN REVIEW OF WORLD HISTORIES 1:1 (JANUARY 2013) context of centuries of monetary evolution that eventually yielded the late-16 thcentury birth of globalization.