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Haiku Illustrated features 90 classic poems from four poets - Matsuo Bashō, Yosa Buson, Kobayashi Issa and Masaoka Shiki - which range across more than 200 years of Japanese poetry. There are few rules to haiku, but they are strict: 17 phonetic sounds, a sense of cutting images or ideas, and a reference to a season. From those restrictions, poets have written about many things, from the year's first blossom to aging, from mosquitoes humming to insects singing, from catching one's shadow to crossing a stream in the summer. In this beautiful new edition, each poem is presented in Japanese script, along with romanized Japanese (romaji) and an English translation. Every few spreads an artwork illustrates an aspect of the poem, such as the traditional Japanese cherry blossom, Mount Fuji, or village life. Beautifully produced in traditional Chinese binding and with a timeless design, Haiku Illustrated is an expert introduction and celebration of one of the most beautiful and accessible forms of poetry in the world.
Footbinding was common in China until the early twentieth century, when most Chinese were family farmers. Why did these families bind young girls' feet? And why did footbinding stop? In this groundbreaking work, Laurel Bossen and Hill Gates upend the popular view of footbinding as a status, or even sexual, symbol by showing that it was an undeniably effective way to get even very young girls to sit still and work with their hands. Interviews with 1,800 elderly women, many with bound feet, reveal the reality of girls' hand labor across the North China Plain, Northwest China, and Southwest China. As binding reshaped their feet, mothers disciplined girls to spin, weave, and do other handwork because many village families depended on selling such goods. When factories eliminated the economic value of handwork, footbinding died out. As the last generation of footbound women passes away, Bound Feet, Young Hands presents a data-driven examination of the social and economic aspects of this misunderstood custom.
The sayings known as Cheng yu are used frequently in Chinese. Chinese Proverbs features 86 of the more than 5,000 Cheng yu, reproduced in a large format. Alongside each phrase is an accessible and inspiring explanation, its literal translation in English, and what the particular strokes symbolize.
An unrivaled and comprehensive look at the 200-year story of Swire, a highly diversified, global group of companies including Cathay Pacific, with a rich and colorful history. The Swire Group, started by John Swire in 1816, had its beginnings as a modest Liverpool import-export company, focused mainly on the textile trade. John Swire's sons, John Samuel (1825-1898) and William Hudson (1830-1884), took the firm overseas and it was John Samuel Swire in particular whose entrepreneurial instincts would be at the root of the firm's successes in years to come. In 1861, John Swire & Sons Limited began to trade with China. In 1866, in partnership with R.S. Butterfield, the firm of Butterfield & Swir...
The story of three generations in twentieth-century China that blends the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history—a bestselling classic in thirty languages with more than ten million copies sold around the world, now with a new introduction from the author. An engrossing record of Mao’s impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love, Jung Chang describes the extraordinary lives and experiences of her family members: her grandmother, a warlord’s concubine; her mother’s struggles as a young idealistic Communist; and her parents’ experience as members of the Communist elite and their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution. Chang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen, then worked as a peasant, a “barefoot doctor,” a steelworker, and an electrician. As the story of each generation unfolds, Chang captures in gripping, moving—and ultimately uplifting—detail the cycles of violent drama visited on her own family and millions of others caught in the whirlwind of history.
Classical Chinese calligraphy is a popular and valuable art form. Characters expressing concepts such as love, peace, respect and happiness are reproduced in a large format, with an accessible and inspiring explanation of how the character developed, what the particular strokes symbolize, and its various different meanings.
A well-written and beautifully illustrated book on foot binding and the exquisite shoes designed for the tiny feet.
YOUNG XING XING IS BOUND. Bound to her father's second wife and daughter after Xing Xing's father has passed away. Bound to a life of servitude as a young girl in ancient China, where the life of a woman is valued less than that of livestock. Bound to be alone and unmarried, with no parents to arrange for a suitable husband. Dubbed "Lazy One" by her stepmother, Xing Xing spends her days taking care of her half sister, Wei Ping, who cannot walk because of her foot bindings, the painful but compulsory tradition for girls who are fit to be married. Even so, Xing Xing is content, for now, to practice her gift for poetry and calligraphy, to tend to the mysterious but beautiful carp in her garden,...
Written in the 6th century BC, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is still used as a book of military strategy today. Using a new translation by James Trapp, this bilingual edition of The Art of War lays the original Chinese text opposite the modern English translation.
A harrowing dual memoir that braids the story of a Chinese-American woman’s search for identity with the dramatic tale of her great-aunt, who was born at the turn of the century in tradition-bound China and went on to become Vice President of China’s first women’s bank. "In China, a woman is nothing." Thus begins the saga of a woman born at the turn of the century to a well-to-do, highly respected Chinese family, a woman who continually defied the expectations of her family and the traditions of her culture. Growing up in the perilous years between the fall of the last emperor and the Communist Revolution, Chang Yu-i's life is marked by a series of rebellions: her refusal as a child to...