Professor Maura Dykstra discusses her journey to become a historian of "boring things." Her research, however, is anything but boring. She delves into the world of Qing bureaucracy and how the systematic reports created a sense of decline in the Qing government's imagination. Her book, Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine, follows the long history of the Qing government discovering more problems, and trying to correct these issues, only to find even more problems.