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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.
Published in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Sept. 28, 2010-Jan. 2, 2011.
"This book is about the ritual world of a group of rural settlements in Shanxi province in pre-1949 North China. Temple festivals, with their giant processions, elaborate rituals, and operas, were the most important influence on the symbolic universe of ordinary villagers and demonstrate their remarkable capacity for religious and artistic creation. The great festivals described in this book were their supreme collective achievements and were carried out virtually without assistance from local officials or educated elites, clerical or lay. Chinese culture was a performance culture, and ritual was the highest form of performance. Village ritual life everywhere in pre-revolutionary China was c...
Editor's NoteIntroduction by David Buisseret1: Mapping the Chinese City: The Image and the Reality Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt2: Mapping the City: Ptolemy's Geography in the Renaissance Naomi Miller3: Urbs and Civitas in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spain Richard L. Kagan4: Military Architecture and Cartography in the Design of the Early Modern City Martha Pollak5: Modeling Cities in Early Modern Europe David Buisseret6: The Plan of Chicago by Daniel H. Burnham and Edward H. Bennett: Cartographic and Historical Perspectives Gerald A. DanzerContributors Index Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Drawing together illustration, theater, and literature, this study examines a late Ming conception of the stage as a mystical space for temporal conflation that allowed the past to be reborn in the present and to uphold the continuity of the cultural tradition
Chinese Imperial City Planning is the first synthesis of what is known from textual and archaeological evidence about every Chinese imperial capital, from earliest times to the present. It explains the fundamental architectural principles and visual characteristics of imperial planning in China and shows how these features are related to the Chinese idea of rulership. The volume also reconstructs the 3,500-year-old history of imperial planning using sources such as resident descriptions, travel accounts, official Chinese court records, and the most recent archaeological and scholarly studies. The extensive documentation provides students with a standard source of reference from which to embark on further research on Chinese urban planning.
Eight studies examine key features of Chinese visual and material cultures, ranging from tomb design, metalware, ceramic pillows, and bronze mirrors, to printed illustrations, calligraphic rubbings, colophons, and paintings on Buddhist, landscape, and narrative themes. Questions addressed include how artists and artisans made their works, the ways both popular literature and market forces could shape ways of looking, and how practices and imagery spread across regions. The authors connect visual materials to funeral and religious practices, drama, poetry, literati life, travel, and trade, showing ways visual images and practices reflected, adapted to, and reproduced the culture and society around them. Readers will gain a stronger appreciation of the richness of the visual and material cultures of Middle Period China.
An investigation of the myth, history, inscriptions, architecture, sculpture, painting, iconological program, festival, rituals and theater of the only known intact ancient dragon king temple in China
In 1967 a body of Chinese texts was discovered in a tomb outside Shanghai. It contained a set of unique examples of an oral genre favoured by unlearned classes in the late imperial period (15th century), best called 'chantefables', appearing at the beginning of a profound historical shift which resulted in a broadening of the uses of writing and printing in China. These texts are now generally seen to occupy an important place in the development of Chinese literature as a whole, and of Chinese vernacular literature in particular. In the first monographic treatment of all the chantefable corpus in English the author, by examination from a more anthropological view, points out that these 'oral...
Illuminates how one folktale serves as a living record of the evolving cultures and relationships of China and Korea