You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Recent archaeological finds in China have made possible a reconstruction of the ancient history of Sichuan, the country's most populous province. Excavated artifacts and new recovered texts now supplement traditional textual materials. Together, these data show how Sichuan matured from peripheral obscurity to attain central importance in the Chinese empire during the first millennium B.C.
Twentieth-century China has been caught between a desire to increase its wealth and power in line with other advanced nations, which, by implication, means copying their institutions, practices and values, whilst simultaneously seeking to preserve China’s independence and historically formed identity. Over time, Chinese philosophers, writers, artists and politicians have all sought to reconcile these goals and this book shows how this search for a Chinese way penetrated even the most central, least contested area of modernity: science. Reviving Ancient Chinese Mathematics is a study of the life of one of modern China’s most admired scientific figures, the mathematician Wu Wen-Tsun. Negot...
Emphasizing reference works published since 1964, these volumes cover books, periodicals, and inclusions (i.e., chapters in edited volumes) on the 1911 Revolution, the Republic of China (1949--), post-1911 Taiwan, post-1911 Hong Kong and Macao, and post-1911 overseas Chinese.
Through detailed discussions of several Buddhist and Chinese moral concepts and beliefs and accompanied by some edifying short stories, this book investigates three types of ethical treatment of animals in early Chinese Buddhism: the imperial bans on animal sacrifice; the early development of the two unique and living traditions of vegetarianism; and the freeing of animals. The book presents a demonstration of the early Chinese acceptance of Indian Buddhism, providing the reader with a better understanding of the early history of Chinese Buddhism in general, and of the integration of Chinese and Indian Buddhist cultures in particular.
"For 1,300 years, Chinese calligraphy was based on the elegant art of Wang Xizhi (A.D. 303–361). But the seventeenth-century emergence of a style modeled on the rough, broken epigraphs of ancient bronzes and stone artifacts brought a revolution in calligraphic taste. By the eighteenth century, this led to the formation of the stele school of calligraphy, which continues to shape Chinese calligraphy today. A dominant force in this school was the eminent calligrapher and art theorist Fu Shan (1607–1685). Because his work spans the late Ming–early Qing divide, it is an ideal prism through which to view the transformation in calligraphy. Rather than seek a single explanation for the change...
The World of the Siege examines relations between the conduct and representations of early modern sieges. The volume offers case studies from various regions in Europe (England, France, the Low Countries, Germany, the Balkans) and throughout the world (the Chinese, Ottoman and Mughal Empires), from the 15th century into the 18th. The international contributors analyse how siege narratives were created and disseminated, and how early modern actors as well as later historians made sense of these violent events in both textual and visual artefacts. . The volume's chronological and geographical breadth provides insight into similarities and differences of siege warfare and military culture across several cultures, countries and centuries, as well as its impact on both combatants and observers. See inside the book.
In a path-breaking series of essays the contributors to this collection explore the development of anthropological research in Asia. The volume includes writings on Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines.
Li Mengyang (1473–1530) was a scholar-official and man of letters who initiated the literary archaist movement that sought to restore ancient styles of prose and poetry in sixteenth-century China. In this first book-length study of Li in English, Chang Woei Ong comprehensively examines his intellectual scheme and situates Li’s quest to redefine literati learning as a way to build a perfect social order in the context of intellectual transitions since the Song dynasty. Ong examines Li’s emergence at the distinctive historical juncture of the mid-Ming dynasty, when differences between northern and southern literati cultures and visions were articulated as a north-south divide (both real ...
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...