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This is the story of the rise of Emperor Gaozu, his alliances and his rivalries, and the priceless partnership provided by his chief military strategist Zhang Liang, who planned victorious campaigns from 1000 miles distance; Xiao He, who stabilized the state, pacified the people, and assured the food supply to the army; and General Han Xin, who commanded the Han army in its conquest of the State of Wei, the State of Zhao, the State of Yan and the State of Qi and played a great role in the defeat of Xiang Yu. Most of the material used in writing The Road to the Throne are taken from the Records of the Grand Historian (Chinese: 史記 or shiji) by the great Sima Qian (145 BC to 85 BC) of the E...
This publication is the long-awaited complement to Michael Loewe's acclaimed Biographical Dictionary of the Qin, Former Han and Xin Periods (2000). With more than 8,000 entries, based upon historical records and surviving inscriptions, the comprehensive Biographical Dictionary of Later Han to the Three Kingdoms (23-220 AD) now provides information on men and women of the Chinese world who lived at the time of Later (or Eastern) Han, from Liu Xiu, founding Emperor Guangwu (reg. 24-57), to the celebrated warlord Cao Cao (155-220) at the end of the dynasty. The entries, including surnames, personal names, styles and dates, are accompanied by maps, genealogical tables and indexes, with lists of books and special accounts of women. These features, together with the convenient surveys of the history and the administrative structure of the dynasty, will make Rafe de Crespigny's work an indispensable tool for any further serious study of a significant but comparatively neglected period of imperial China.
Translations of the Yi jing into western languages have been biased towards the yili ('meaning and pattern') tradition, whereas studies of the xiangshu ('image and number') tradition - which takes as its point of departure the imagery and numerology associated with divination and its hexagrams, trigrams, lines, and related charts and diagrams - has remained relatively unexplored. This major new reference work is organised as a Chinese-English encyclopedia, arranged alphabetically according to the pinyin romanisation, with Chinese characters appended. A character index as well as an English index is included. The entries are of two kinds: technical terms and various other concepts related to the 'image and number' tradition, and bio-bibliographical information on Chinese Yi jing scholars. Each entry in the former category has a brief explanation that includes references to the origins of the term, cross-references, and a reference to an entry giving a more comprehensive treatment of the subject.
Documents the rise and fall of a market economy in China from 10001500. Since the economic liberalization of the 1980s, the Chinese economy has boomed and is poised to become the worlds largest market economy, a position traditional China held a millennium ago. William Guanglin Lius bold and fascinating book is the first to rely on quantitative methods to investigate the early market economy that existed in China, making use of rare market and population data produced by the Song dynasty in the eleventh century. A counterexample comes from the century around 1400 when the early Ming court deliberately turned agrarian society into a command economy system. This radical change not only shrank markets, but also caused a sharp decline in the living standards of common people. Lius landmark study of the rise and fall of a market economy highlights important issues for contemporary China at both the empirical and theoretical levels.
Here rendered into English for the first time, these chapters provide important insights into the worlds of palace women and court politics, while revealing much about the lives of upper-class women in general at the close of the third century."--BOOK JACKET.
The political and cultural power of Confucianism is nowhere more apparent than in ritual. Confucian-educated officials proficient in Ritual Learning shape the ritual institutions that express dynastic legitimacy. This book follows the workings of Ritual Learning during the first three centuries of the Common Era, a time marked by three dynastic changes and difficult recovery of the ritual order under new regimes. Contrary to common understanding, the Eastern Han is a time of flux, uncertainty, and neglect in Confucian ritual forms, and the following third century is an era when Confucian dominance over imperial ritual crystallized as never before.
"Between the sixth and twentieth centuries, the civil service examinations created and maintained political coherence across the Chinese polity. Preparation for the examinations transformed the lives of literate elites by defining educational standards and disseminating a language that determined elite status. However, as participation in the examinations became central to that status, an intense competition to determine the educational curriculum and the subject matter of the examinations erupted between intellectual and political rivals. The principal goal of this book is to explain the restructuring of the examination field during a critical point in its history, the Southern Song dynasty...
"Shen Gua (1031–1095) is a household name in China, known as a distinguished renaissance man and the author of Brush Talks from Dream Brook, an old text whose remarkable “scientific” discoveries make it appear curiously ahead of its time. In this first book-length study of Shen in English, Ya Zuo reveals the connection between Shen’s life as an active statesman and his ideas, specifically the empirical stance manifested through his wide-ranging inquiries. She places Shen on the broad horizon of premodern Chinese thought, and presents his empiricism within an extensive narrative of Chinese epistemology.Relying on Shen as a searchlight, Zuo focuses in on how an individual thinker summoned conditions and concepts from the vast Chinese intellectual tradition to build a singular way of knowing. Moreover, her study of Shen provides insights into the complex dynamics in play at the dawn of the age of Neo-Confucianism and compels readers to achieve a deeper appreciation of the diversity in Chinese thinking."