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The Troubled Empire
The Mongol takeover in the 1270s changed the course of Chinese history. The Confucian empireÑa millennium and a half in the makingÑwas suddenly thrust under foreign occupation. What China had been before its reunification as the Yuan dynasty in 1279 was no longer what it would be in the future. Four centuries later, another wave of steppe invaders would replace the Ming dynasty with yet another foreign occupation. The Troubled Empire explores what happened to China between these two dramatic invasions. If anything defined the complex dynamics of this period, it was changes in the weather. Asia, like Europe, experienced a Little Ice Age, and as temperatures fell in the thirteenth century, K...
China on the Sea
Generations of Chinese scholars have made China synonymous with the Great Wall and presented its civilization as fundamentally land-bound. This volume challenges this perspective, demonstrating that China was not a “Walled Kingdom”, certainly not since the Yongjia Disturbance in 311. China reached out to the maritime world far more actively than historians have acknowledged, while the seas and what came from the seas—from Islam, fragrances and Jesuits to maize, opium and clocks—significantly changed the course of history, and have been of inestimable importance to China since the Ming. This book integrates the maritime history of China, especially the Qing period, a subject which has hitherto languished on the periphery of scholarly analysis, into the mainstream of current historical narrative. It was the seas that made Tang China a “Cosmopolitan Empire” (Mark Lewis), the Song dynasty China’s “Greatest Age” (John Fairbank), China at 1600 “the largest and most sophisticated of all unified realms on earth” (Jonathan Spence), and the reign of the three Qing emperors (Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong) China’s “last golden age” (Charles Hucker).
The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History
This volume seeks to study the connections between two well-studied epochs in Chinese history: the mid-imperial era of the Tang and Song (ca. 800-1270) and the late imperial era of the late Ming and Qing (1550-1900). Both eras are seen as periods of explosive change, particularly in economic activity, characterized by the emergence of new forms of social organization and a dramatic expansion in knowledge and culture. The task of establishing links between these two periods has been impeded by a lack of knowledge of the intervening Mongol Yuan dynasty (1271-1368). This historiographical "black hole" has artificially interrupted the narrative of Chinese history and bifurcated it into two disti...
Soulstealers
Midway through the reign of the Ch’ien-lung emperor, Hungli, in the most prosperous period of China’s last imperial dynasty, mass hysteria broke out among the common people. It was feared that sorcerers were roaming the land, clipping off the ends of men’s queues (the braids worn by royal decree), and chanting magical incantations over them in order to steal the souls of their owners. In a fascinating chronicle of this epidemic of fear and the official prosecution of soulstealers that ensued, Philip Kuhn provides an intimate glimpse into the world of eighteenth-century China. Kuhn weaves his exploration of the sorcery cases with a survey of the social and economic history of the era. D...
Mesny's Chinese Miscellany
A text book of notes on China and the Chinese.
A Paradise Lost
Noted for its magnificent architecture and extraordinary history, the Yuanming Yuan is China's most famous imperial garden. The complex was begun in the early eighteenth century, and construction continued over the next 150 years. While Chinese historians, and many Chinese in general, view the garden as the paramount achievement of Chinese architecture and landscape design, almost nothing is known about the Yuanming Yuan in the West. A Paradise Lost is the first comprehensive study of the palatial garden complex in a Western language. Written in a broad and engaging style, Young-tsu Wong brings "the garden of perfect brightness" to life as he leads readers on a grand tour of its architecture...
Yuan Ming Yuan
This book presents the most recent studies on Yuanming yuan (Garden of Perfect Brightness). Scholars from different disciplines expand the understanding of Yuanming y uan from the angles of architectural design, garden lifestyle, artistic creation, and visual legacy. Puay-peng Ho discusses the role of gardens in royal life and governance; Yang Xu examines the depictions of Yuanming yuan scenes in the context of images related to Qing imperial estates; Cary Liu reviews how different forms of visual material and architectural models were utilised in the design and implementation of Yuanming yuan landscapes; Wang Zhongjie traces the styles of architectural decoration in the garden; Thomas Hahn ...
The History of Gardens
"Christopher Thacker tells the history of gardens from their origins in the 'natural' paradises of Greek myth to the present day. Studying individual gardens or garden topics which are representative of an age or region, he builds up a comprehensive survey of the gardens and garden theories of an era"--
The Stonewares of Yixing
Despite its beauty, individuality and variety of design, the red or brown unglazed stoneware produced at Yixing in Jiangsu Province has received less attention than other branches of Chinese ceramic art. The Yixing potters have always specialized in the making of teapots, whose use became widespread during the Ming period as a result of the innovation of making tea from rolled leaves, rather than using it in the fine-ground, powdered from in which it had previously been supplied.
Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities
In Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities, John Wei brings light to the germination and movements of queer cultures and social practices in today’s China and Sinophone Asia. While many scholars attribute China’s emergent queer cultures to the neoliberal turn and the global political landscape, Wei refuses to take these assumptions for granted. He finds that the values and pitfalls of the development-induced mobilities and post-development syndromes have conjointly structured and sustained people’s ongoing longings and sufferings under the dual pressure of compulsory familism and compulsory development. While young gay men are increasingly mobilized in their decision-making to pursue soc...
