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A man flies onto a painting and has a romantic affair with a beauty in it. A Taoist monk punishes a stingy and mean pear seller by planting a pear tree that bears fruits in minutes before giving them away for free, all at the expense of the seller. A young scholar is delighted to find a lover of striking beauty, but only to find out later that it is actually an ugly ghost with a painted human skin … This ebook is a translation of forty fascinating stories of supernatural beings like ghosts and fox spirits from The Remarkable Stories Told at a Chinese Salon, one of the masterpieces in Chinese culture.
Among the large caches of private documents discovered and collected in China, few rival the Huizhou sources for the insight they provide into Chinese local society and economy over the past millennium. Having spent decades researching these exceptionally rich sources, Joseph P. McDermott presents in two volumes his findings about the major social and economic changes in this important prefecture of south China from around 900 to 1700. In this first volume, we learn about village settlement, competition among village religious institutions, premodern agricultural production, the management of land and lineage, the rise of the lineage as the dominant institution, and its members' application of commercial practices to local forestry operations. This landmark study of religious life and economic activity, of lineage and land, and of rural residents and urban commercial practices provides a compelling new framework for understanding a distinctive path of economic and social development for premodern China and beyond.
Scholars have described the eighteenth century in China as a time of “state activism” when the state sought to strengthen its control on various social and cultural sectors. The Taiping Rebellion and the postbellum restoration efforts of the mid-nineteenth century have frequently been associated with the origins of elite activism. However, drawing upon a wide array of sources, including previously untapped Qing government documents, After the Prosperous Age argues that the ascendance of elite activism can be traced to the Jiaqing and Daoguang reigns in the early nineteenth century, and that the Taiping Rebellion served as a second catalyst for the expansion of elite public roles rather t...
A landmark study of the long-term dynamics of Chinese village history proposing a new framework for understanding pre-modern economies in Asia.
The weird and whimsical short stories in Strange Tales from Liaozhai show their author, Pu Songling (1640-1715), to be both an explorer of the macabre, like Edgar Allan Poe, and a moralist, like Aesop. In this first complete translation of the collection's 494 stories into English, readers will encounter supernatural creatures, natural disasters, magical aspects of Buddhist and Daoist spirituality, and a wide range of Chinese folklore. Annotations are provided to clarify unfamiliar references or cultural allusions, and introductory essays have been included to explain facets of Pu Songling's work and to provide context for some of the unique qualities of his uncanny tales. This is the second of 6 volumes.
Liaozhai Zhiyi (Liaozhai; Chinese: 聊齋, or 聊齋誌異), called in English Strange Tales from a Chinese Lonely Studio is a collection of Classical Chinese stories by Pu Songling comprising close to five hundred "marvel tales" in the zhiguai and chuanqi styles which serve to implicitly criticise societal issues then. Dating back to the Qing dynasty, its earliest publication date is given as 1740. Since then, many of the critically lauded stories have been adapted for other media such as film and television. The main characters of this book apparently are ghosts, foxes, immortals and demons, but the author focused on the everyday life of commoners. He used the supernatural and the unexplainable to illustrate his ideas of society and government. He criticized the corruption and injustice in society and sympathized with the poor. The book is complete translation of all volumes (Vol. 1 to 12) of Liaozhai.
This volume develops a new style of reading Chinese sources, as pioneered in Chinese Studies by Professor Glen Dudbridge, providing fascinating new insights into Chinese literature, history and popular culture. The analysis of self-fashioning, representation and political propaganda sheds new light on Chinese perceptions of the world.
Here is a convincing reflection that changes our understanding of gender in Maoist culture, esp. for what critics from the 1990s onwards have termed its erasure of gender and sexuality. In particular the strong heroines of the yangbanxi, or model works which dominated the Cultural Revolution period, have been seen as genderless revolutionaries whose images were damaging to women. Drawing on contemporary theories ranging from literary and cultural studies to sociology, this book challenges that established view through detailed semiotic analysis of theatrical systems of the yangbanxi including costume, props, kinesics, and various audio and linguistic systems. Acknowledging the complex interplay of traditional, modern, Chinese and foreign gender ideologies as manifest in the 'model works', it fundamentally changes our insights into gender in Maoist culture.
The 1,165 entries of Handbooks and Anthologies for Officials in Imperial China by Pierre-Étienne Will and collaborators provide a descriptive list of extant manuscript and printed works—mainly from the Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties—created with the aim to instruct officials and other administrators of imperial China about the technical and ethical aspects of government, and to provide tools and guides to help with the relevant procedures. Both generalist and specialized texts are considered. Among the latter, such disciplines as the administration of justice, famine relief, and the military receive particular attention. Each entry includes the publishing history of the work considered (including modern editions), an analysis of contents, and a biographical sketch of the author.