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The Caves of Dunhuang
The cave temples of Mogao are near Dunhuang at the extreme western end of the Silk Road in China. Founded by Buddhist monks in the fourth century, the caves were inhabited as an isolated monastery for over 1,000 years. The murals with which the caves were decorated create one of the finest examples of Buddhist art in China, reflecting the changing styles of Chinese art for more than a millennium. The caves were also the repository of many other treasures, including works on silk and paper as well as tens of thousands of Buddhist manuscripts. The site itself, on the fringes of the Gobi desert, is one of great beauty and historical resonance. This book examines 50 of the finest caves in detail...
Between Heaven and Modernity
Combining social, political, and cultural history, this book examines the contestation over space, history, and power in the late Qing and Republican-era reconstruction of the ancient capital of Suzhou as a modern city. Located fifty miles west of Shanghai, Suzhou has been celebrated throughout Asia as a cynosure of Chinese urbanity and economic plenty for a thousand years. With the city's 1895 opening as a treaty port, businessmen and state officials began to draw on Western urban planning in order to bolster Chinese political and economic power against Japanese encroachment. As a result, both Suzhou as a whole and individual components of the cityscape developed new significance according to a calculus of commerce and nationalism. Japanese monks and travelers, Chinese officials, local people, and others competed to claim Suzhou’s streets, state institutions, historic monuments, and temples, and thereby to define the course of Suzhou’s and greater China’s modernity.
The Case for Repatriating China’s Cultural Objects
This book investigates China's demands for the repatriation of Chinese cultural relics 'lost' during the country's modern history. It addresses two main research questions: Can the original owners, or their rightful successors, of cultural objects looted, stolen, or illicitly exported before the adoption of the 1954 Hague Convention and the 1970 UNESCO Convention reclaim their cultural objects pursuant to remedies provided by international or national law? And what are the philosphical, ethical, and cultural considerations of identity underlying the international conventions protecting cultural objects and claims made for repatriating them? The first part of the book explores current positiv...
Maṇḍalas in the Making
The first scholarly monograph on Buddhist maṇḍalas in China, this book examines the Maṇḍala of Eight Great Bodhisattvas. This iconographic template, in which a central Buddha is flanked by eight attendants, flourished during the Tibetan (786–848) and post-Tibetan Guiyijun (848–1036) periods at Dunhuang. A rare motif that appears in only four cave shrines at the Mogao and Yulin sites, the maṇḍala bore associations with political authority and received patronage from local rulers. Attending to the historical and cultural contexts surrounding this iconography, this book demonstrates that transcultural communication over the Silk Routes during this period, and the religious dialogue between the Chinese and Tibetan communities, were defining characteristics of the visual language of Buddhist maṇḍalas at Dunhuang.
The End of Cool Japan
Today’s convergent media environment offers unprecedented opportunities for sourcing and disseminating previously obscure popular culture material from Japan. However, this presents concerns regarding copyright, ratings and exposure to potentially illegal content which are serious problems for those teaching and researching about Japan. Despite young people’s enthusiasm for Japanese popular culture, these concerns spark debate about whether it can be judged harmful for youth audiences and could therefore herald the end of ‘cool Japan’. This collection brings together Japan specialists in order to identify key challenges in using Japanese popular culture materials in research and teac...
Reading Medieval Chinese Poetry
Nine renowned sinologists present a range of studies that display the riches of medieval Chinese verse in varied guises. All major verse-forms, including shi, fu, and ci, are examined, with a special focus on poetry’s negotiation with tradition and historical context. Dozens of previously untranslated works are here rendered in English for the first time, and readers will enter a literary culture that was deeply infused with imperatives of wit, learning, and empathy. Among the diverse topics met with in this volume are metaphysical poetry as a medium of social exchange, the place of ruins in Chinese poetry, the reality and imaginary of frontier borderlands, the enigma of misattribution, and how a 19th-century Frenchwoman discovered Tang poetry for the Western world. Contributors include Timothy Wai Keung Chan, Robert Joe Cutter, Ronald Egan, David R. Knechtges, Paul W. Kroll, Stephen Owen, Wendy Swartz, Ding Xiang Warner, and Pauline Yu.
Localizing Learning
As the first intellectual history of Song, Yuan, and Ming China written from a local perspective, Localizing Learning shows how literati learning in Wuzhou came to encompass examination studies, Neo-Confucian moral philosophy, historical and Classical scholarship, encyclopedic learnedness, and literary writing, and traces how debates over the relative value of moral cultivation, cultural accomplishment, and political service unfolded locally. The book is set in one locality, Wuzhou (later Jinhua), a prefecture in China’s Zhejiang province, from the twelfth through the sixteenth century. Its main actors are literati of the Song, Yuan, and Ming, who created a local tradition of learning as a...
The Apothecary Diaries: Volume 4
Though her main duty is still looking after Consort Gyokuyou, Maomao finds time to help her friends and acquaintances in the rear palace, including Xiaolan, who will need a job after her term of service ends, and Consort Lishu, who’s convinced she’s seen a ghost! When complications arise with Gyokuyou’s pregnancy, however, Maomao knows she’s not skilled enough to handle a situation that could threaten the life of both mother and child. She knows someone who is, but they haven’t been welcome in the rear palace for a very long time… Meanwhile, Maomao begins to discern what seem to be links between otherwise unrelated incidents in the rear palace. But what if her dawning knowledge makes her the next victim?
The Global Vampire
The media vampire has roots throughout the world, far beyond the shores of the usual Dracula-inspired Anglo-American archetypes. Depending on text and context, the vampire is a figure of anxiety and comfort, humor and fear, desire and revulsion. These dichotomies gesture the enduring prevalence of the vampire in mass culture; it can no longer articulate a single feeling or response, bound by time and geography, but is many things to many people. With a global perspective, this collection of essays offers something new and different: a much needed counter-narrative of the vampire's evolution in popular culture. Divided by geography, this text emphasizes the vampiric as a globetrotting citizen du monde rather than an isolated monster.
Negotiated Power
The internal dynamics driving the relationship between the state and local society during the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties has both captivated and baffled scholars. In this book, Sukhee Lee posits an alternative understanding of the relationship between the state and social elites in the middle period of Chinese imperial history. Directly challenging the assumption of a zero-sum competition between the power of the state and that of local elites, Negotiated Power shows in vivid detail how state power and local elite interests were mutually constitutive and reinforcing. It was precisely the connectedness of social elites to the state, as well as the presence of the state in local life, that was essential to the rise of a self-conscious local elite society during this period. In probing the historical trajectory of Mingzhou prefecture (today’s Ningbo), Lee makes extensive use of local gazetteers from the Southern Song and the Yuan dynasties, and the abundant literary collections that still survive from this area, including some 280 epitaphs written for Mingzhou people of the time.
