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This book is the first on Chinese eunuchs in English and presents a comprehensive picture of the role that they played in the Ming dynasty, 1368-1644. Extracted from a wide range of primary and secondary source material, the author provides significant and interesting information about court politics, espionage and internal security, military and foreign affairs, tax and tribute collection, the operation of imperial monopolies, judiciary review, the layout of the palace complex, the Grand Canal, and much more. The eunuchs are shown to be not just a minor adjunct to a government of civil servants and military officers, but a fully developed third branch of the Ming administration that participated in all of the most essential matters of the dynasty. The veil of condemnation and jealousy imposed on eunuchs by the compilers of official history is pulled away to reveal a richly textured tapestry. Eunuchs are portrayed in a balanced manner that gives due consideration to able and faithful service along with the inept, the lurid, and the iniquitous.
"In 1788, a handful of French monks and nuns set sail fro Vietnam. They preach the Gospels to the peasants of these unknown tropics, and only by chance learn from passing ships about the terror of the Revolution, the death of their King, and the oppression of their Church. After 1792 there is no further news--Europe has forgotten them. In their years of trial these valorous men and women both abandon everything and reinvent everything. The jungle, by its ordeals and its beauties, transforms them; in it they will live and die, having forgotten God in the struggle."--Page 4 of cover
A Vedic Concordance is a monumental work by the famous American Sanskritist Maurice Bloomfield planned prepared and published during the years 1892-1906. It affords primarily an easy and ready means of ascertaining the following things: First where a given mantra occurs if it occurs but once second whether it occurs wlsewhere either with or without variants and in what places and third if it occurs with variants what those variants are. One hundred and nineteen texts in all have been drawn upon for contributions to the concordance comprising .The concordance also includes a very considerable amount of material not yet published. The concordance may also be readily put to certain indirect or secondary uses which are scarcely less important for the systematic progress of vedic study.
The general tendency among theorists in nationalism and national identity has been to assume that the modernization process in Asia and Africa is a kind of distorted reflection of a Western precedent; Asian forms of the nation have rarely been seen as independent, alternative models. Among today's leading theoreticians, there is a growing tendency to take Asia seriously, and to include Asian examples in the general discussion. The aim of the present collection is to build on and reinforce this tendency. It does not postulate any specifically Asian form of the nation, as opposed to a Western one. Rather, it seeks to demonstrate that in Asia, as well as in Europe, each nation forms a unique amalgam which can be compared fruitfully with others. History, culture and geography have posed various kinds of limits to what can be imagined (as Benedict Anderson puts it). The relationship between geographical space and national construction is explored in depth here.