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The Sung Dynasty (960-1279) was a paradoxical era for Chinese women. This was a time when footbinding spread, and Confucian scholars began to insist that it was better for a widow to starve than to remarry. Yet there were also improvements in women's status in marriage and property rights. In this thoroughly original work, one of the most respected scholars of premodern China brings to life what it was like to be a woman in Sung times, from having a marriage arranged, serving parents-in-law, rearing children, and coping with concubines, to deciding what to do if widowed. Focusing on marriage, Patricia Buckley Ebrey views family life from the perspective of women. She argues that the ideas, a...
Includes entries for maps and atlases.
For centuries the island of Taiwan, 100 miles off the Asian mainland, has been a crossroads for traders and settlers, pirates and military schemers from around the world. Unlike China, with its long tradition of keeping foreigners out, Taiwan has a long history of interaction, both hostile and friendly, with other seafaring nations near and far. "Maritime Taiwan" captures the full drama and details of this remarkable history. It's filled with fascinating stories of foreign adventurers and echoes the bitter songs of Taiwan's aboriginal population, confronted by the convergence of different maritime cultures and values on the island.Here are accounts of the legendary pirate Koxinga, the Chines...
The Pretended Asian also traces Psalmanazar's later career as a Grub Street hack writer and how his lifelong refusal to reveal his real identity - even after Europeans stopped believing he was a native of Formosa - may have rendered Psalmanazar a permanent outsider."--BOOK JACKET.
Until now our understanding of marriage in China has been based primarily on observations made during the twentieth century. The research of ten eminent scholars presented here provides a new vision of marriage in Chinese history, exploring the complex interplay between marriage and the social, political, economic, and gender inequalities that have so characterized Chinese society.
The Zheng family of merchants and militarists emerged from the tumultuous seventeenth century amid a severe economic depression, a harrowing dynastic transition from the ethnic Chinese Ming to the Manchu Qing, and the first wave of European expansion into East Asia. Under four generations of leaders over six decades, the Zheng had come to dominate trade across the China Seas. Their average annual earnings matched, and at times exceeded, those of their fiercest rivals: the Dutch East India Company. Although nominally loyal to the Ming in its doomed struggle against the Manchus, the Zheng eventually forged an autonomous territorial state based on Taiwan with the potential to encompass the family's entire economic sphere of influence. Through the story of the Zheng, Xing Hang provides a fresh perspective on the economic divergence of early modern China from western Europe, its twenty-first-century resurgence, and the meaning of a Chinese identity outside China.
""A vertitable feast of concise, useful, reliable, and up-to-dateinformation (all prepared by top scholars in the field), Nienhauser's now two-volumetitle stands alone as THE standard reference work for the study of traditionalChinese literature. Nothing like it has ever been published."" --Choice The second volume to The Indiana Companion to TraditionalChinese Literature is both a supplement and an update to the original volume. VolumeII includes over 60 new entries on famous writers, works, and genres of traditionalChinese literature, followed by an extensive bibliographic update (1985-1997) ofeditions, translations, and studies (primarily in English, Chinese, Japanese, French, and German) for the 500+ entries of Volume I.