Download or read book The Chinese State in Ming Society written by Timothy Brook and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique collection of reworked and heavily illustrated essays, by one of the leading scholars of Chinese history, re-examines the relationship between the present day state and society in China.
Download or read book A Ming Society written by John W. Dardess and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Dardess has selected a region of great political and intellectual importance, but one which local history has left almost untouched, for this detailed social history of T'ai-ho county during the Ming dynasty. Rather than making a sweeping, general survey of the region, he follows the careers of a large number of native sons and their relationship to Ming imperial politics. Using previously unexplored primary sources, Dardess details the rise and development of T'ai-ho village kinship, family lineage, landscape, agriculture, and economy. He follows its literati to positions of prominence in imperial government. This concentration on the history of one county over almost three centuries gives rise to an unusually sound and immediate understanding of how Ming society functioned and changed over time. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.
Download or read book A Ming Society written by John W. Dardess and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The scholarship is excellent, and the book is a culmination of a massive project of exhaustive research that has occupied Dardess for many years."--Robert Hymes, author of Ordering the World "An important book, by an important historian. Not only did I gain a remarkable set of insights into Ming political and intellectual history from time invested in these pages, it was a genuine pleasure to read."--William T. Rowe, author of Hankow
Download or read book A Ming Society written by John W. Dardess and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Dardess has selected a region of great political and intellectual importance, but one which local history has left almost untouched, for this detailed social history of T'ai-ho county during the Ming dynasty. Rather than making a sweeping, general survey of the region, he follows the careers of a large number of native sons and their relationship to Ming imperial politics. Using previously unexplored primary sources, Dardess details the rise and development of T'ai-ho village kinship, family lineage, landscape, agriculture, and economy. He follows its literati to positions of prominence in imperial government. This concentration on the history of one county over almost three centuries gives rise to an unusually sound and immediate understanding of how Ming society functioned and changed over time. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.
Download or read book A Ming Society written by John W. Dardess and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Confusions of Pleasure written by Timothy Brook and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1998-05-18 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ming dynasty was the last great Chinese dynasty before the Manchu conquest in 1644. During that time, China, not Europe, was the center of the world: the European voyages of exploration were searching not just for new lands but also for new trade routes to the Far East. In this book, Timothy Brook eloquently narrates the changing landscape of life over the three centuries of the Ming (1368-1644), when China was transformed from a closely administered agrarian realm into a place of commercial profits and intense competition for status. The Confusions of Pleasure marks a significant departure from the conventional ways in which Chinese history has been written. Rather than recounting the Ming dynasty in a series of political events and philosophical achievements, it narrates this longue durée in terms of the habits and strains of everyday life. Peppered with stories of real people and their negotiations of a rapidly changing world, this book provides a new way of seeing the Ming dynasty that not only contributes to the scholarly understanding of the period but also provides an entertaining and accessible introduction to Chinese history for anyone.
Download or read book The Chinese Empire in Local Society written by Michael Szonyi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) military, its impact on local society, and its many legacies for Chinese society. It is based on extensive original research by scholars using the methodology of historical anthropology, an approach that has transformed the study of Chinese history by approaching the subject from the bottom up. Its nine chapters, each based on a different region of China, examine the nature of Ming military institutions and their interaction with local social life over time. Several chapters consider the distinctive role of imperial institutions in frontier areas and how they interacted with and affected non-Han ethnic groups and ethnic identity. Others discuss the long-term legacy of Ming military institutions, especially across the dynastic divide from Ming to Qing (1644-1912) and the implications of this for understanding more fully the nature of the Qing rule.
Download or read book Ming China 1368 1644 written by John W. Dardess and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2012 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This engaging, deeply informed book provides the first concise history of one of China's most important eras. Leading scholar John W. Dardess offers a thematically organized political, social, and economic exploration of China from 1368 to 1644. He examines how the Ming dynasty was able to endure for 276 years, illuminating Ming foreign relations and border control, the lives and careers of its sixteen emperors, its system of governance and the kinds of people who served it, its great class of literati, and finally the mass outlawry that, in unhappy conjunction with the Manchu invasions from outside, ended the once-mighty dynasty in the mid-seventeenth century. The Ming witnessed the beginning of China's contact with the West, and its story will fascinate all readers interested in global as well as Asian history.
Download or read book The Ming Dynasty written by Charles O. Hucker and published by U OF M CENTER FOR CHINESE STUDIES. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the latter half of the fourteenth century, at one end of the Eurasian continent, the stage was not yet set for the emergence of modern nation-states. At the other end, the Chinese drove out their Mongol overlords, inaugurated a new native dynasty called Ming (1368–1644), and reasserted the mastery of their national destiny. It was a dramatic era of change, the full significance of which can only be perceived retrospectively. With the establishment of the Ming dynasty, a major historical tension rose into prominence between more absolutist and less absolutist modes of rulership. This produced a distinctive style of rule that modern students have come to call Ming despotism. It proved a capriciously absolutist pattern for Chinese government into our own time. [1, 2 ,3]
Download or read book 1587 a Year of No Significance written by Ray Huang and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1981-01-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Creates a portrait of the world and culture of late imperial China by examining the lives of seven prominent officials and members of the Ming ruling class
Download or read book The Military Collapse of China s Ming Dynasty 1618 44 written by Kenneth M. Swope and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-23 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the military collapse of China’s Ming Dynasty to a combination of foreign and domestic foes. The Ming’s defeat was a highly surprising development, not least because as recently as in the 1590s the Ming had managed to defeat a Japanese force considered to be perhaps the most formidable of its day when the latter attempted to subjugate Korea en-route to a planned invasion of China. In contrast to conventional explanations for the Ming’s collapse, which focus upon political and socio-economic factors, this book shows how the military collapse of the Ming state was intimately connected to the deterioration of the personal relationship between the Ming throne and the military establishment that had served as the cornerstone of the Ming military renaissance of the previous decades. Moreover, it examines the broader process of the militarization of late Ming society as a whole to arrive at an understanding of how a state with such tremendous military resources and potential could be defeated by numerically and technologically inferior foes. It concludes with a consideration of the fall of the Ming in light of contemporary conflicts and regime changes around the globe, drawing attention to climatological factors and developments outside state control. Utilizing recently released archival materials, this book adds a much needed piece to the puzzle of the collapse of the Ming Dynasty in China.
Download or read book Technology and Society in Ming China 1368 1644 written by Francesca Bray and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians of Chinese technology have tended to pay little attention to the Ming dynasty, characterizing it as a stagnantperiod unmarked by significant inventions of the kind that in Europe gave rise to the industrial revolution and the modern world. Yet the Ming was a period of extraordinary social, cultural, and economic vitality and change, and it would be curious if technology had played no part in these changes. This pamphlet approaches the material world of the Ming from a more anthropological perspective than has been conventional among historians of China, emphasizing the role of technologies in social order and identity.
Download or read book Disorder Under Heaven written by James Tong and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1992-02-01 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A monumental study of collective violence in the premodern world, this book analyzes all instances of rebellion and banditry recorded in 1,097 countries in China during the 277 years of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). The assembled evidence constitutes the largest annual, county-level time-series on collective violence events in any part of the world, and the 630 recorded cases are used to test the major social science theories on the origins of collective violence. Using systematic data collected from local gazetteers on natural calamities, size of harvests, famine relief, physical terrain, local construction, and troop deployment, the author advances and validates a rational-choice argument that violence increased when survival in a subsistence economy became uncertain and the likelihood of punishment was low. Analyzing the administrative effectiveness and coercive capacity of the Ming state, the author also finds evidence to support a complementary structuralist explanation for increased collective violence in times of lax rulers, state insolvency, and inadequate welfare and tax policies. After an introductory chapter, the author explicates the main theoretical and methodological issues of collective violence and sketches the empirical pattern of rebellions and banditry, differentiating them by the level of threat they posed to the regime and by the sociopolitical profile of participating groups. In the next four chapters, he relates the Ming empirical configuration to four theoretical frameworks for collective violence: rational choice,which includes the issue of motive and choice—why people chose to become bandits; opportunity, in which the level of Ming collective violence is treated to variations in a regime's coercive capacity; social change, which is used to shed light on food riots, anti-tax rebellions, and conflict between employers and employees and between natives and outsiders; and class conflict, which prompts the author to assess the Marxist explanation for collective violence by investigating revolts of commoners against imperial clansmen, bondservants against masters, and tenants against landlords. The final chapter presents how the author's conclusions on why and how people became outlaws in the Ming and points the questions for future research.
Download or read book Fruitful Sites written by Craig Clunas and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gardens are sites that can be at one and the same time admired works of art and valuable pieces of real estate. As the first account in English to be wholly based on contemporary Chinese sources, this innovative, beautifully illustrated book grounds the practices of garden-making in Ming dynasty China (1368-1644) firmly in the social and cultural history of the day. Who owned Ming gardens? Who visited them? How were they represented in words, in paintings, and in visual culture generally, and what meanings did these representations hold at different levels of Chinese society? How did the discourse of gardens intersect with other discourses such as those of aesthetics, agronomy, geomancy, and botany? By examining the gardens of the city of Suzhou from a number of different angles, Craig Clunas provides a rich picture of a complex cultural phenomenon--one that was of crucial importance to the self-fashioning of the Ming elite. Drawing on a wide range of recent work in cultural theory, the author provides for the first time a historical and materialist account of Chinese garden culture, and replaces broad generalizations and orientalist fantasy with a convincing picture of the garden's role in social life. Fruitful Sites will appeal to all students of China's cultural history, to students of garden history from any part of the world, to art historians, and to readers engaged in Asian and cultural studies.
Download or read book The Great Ming Code Da Ming lu written by and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imperial China’s dynastic legal codes provide a wealth of information for historians, social scientists, and scholars of comparative law and of literary, cultural, and legal history. Until now, only the Tang (618–907 C.E.) and Qing (1644–1911 C.E.) codes have been available in English translation. The present book is the first English translation of The Great Ming Code (Da Ming lu), which reached its final form in 1397. The translation is preceded by an introductory essay that places the Code in historical context, explores its codification process, and examines its structure and contents. A glossary of Chinese terms is also provided. One of the most important law codes in Chinese history, The Great Ming Code represents a break with the past, following the alien-ruled Yuan (Mongol) dynasty, and the flourishing of culture under the Ming, the last great Han-ruled dynasty. It was also a model for the Qing code, which followed it, and is a fundamental source for understanding Chinese society and culture. The Code regulated all the perceived major aspects of social affairs, aiming at the harmony of political, economic, military, familial, ritual, international, and legal relations in the empire and cosmic relations in the universe. The all-encompassing nature of the Code makes it an encyclopedic document, providing rich materials on Ming history. Because of the pervasiveness of legal proceedings in the culture generally, the Code has relevance far beyond the specialized realm of Chinese legal studies. The basic value system and social norms that the Code imposed became so thoroughly ingrained in Chinese society that the Manchus, who conquered China and established the Qing dynasty, chose to continue the Code in force with only minor changes. The Code made a considerable impact on the legal cultures of other East Asian countries: Yi dynasty Korea, Le dynasty Vietnam, and late Tokugawa and early Meiji Japan. Examining why and how some rules in the Code were adopted and others rejected in these countries will certainly enhance our understanding of the shared culture and indigenous identities in East Asia.
Download or read book A Ming Confucians World written by Rong Lu and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A forgotten century marks the years between the Ming dynasty?s (1368?1644) turbulent founding and its sixteenth-century age of exploration and economic transformation. In this period of social stability, retired scholar-official Lu Rong chronicled his observations of Chinese society in Miscellaneous Records from the Bean Garden (Shuyuan zaji). Openly expressing his admirations and frustrations, Lu provides a window into the quotidian that sets Bean Garden apart from other works of the biji genre of ?informal notes.? Mark Halperin organizes a translated selection of Lu?s accounts from Miscellaneous Records from the Bean Garden to create a panorama of Ming life. A man of unusual curiosity, Lu describes multiple social classes, ethnicities, and locales in his accounts of political intrigues, farming techniques, religious practices, etiquette, crime, and family life. Centuries after their composition, Lu?s words continue to provide a richly textured portrait of China on the cusp of the early modern era.
Download or read book Culture Courtiers and Competition written by David M. Robinson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This collection of essays reveals the Ming court as an arena of competition and negotiation, where a large cast of actors pursued individual and corporate ends, personal agency shaped protocol and style, and diverse people, goods, and tastes converged. Rather than observing an immutable set of traditions, court culture underwent frequent reinterpretation and rearticulation, processes driven by immediate personal imperatives, mediated through social, political, and cultural interaction.The essays address several common themes. First, they rethink previous notions of imperial isolation, instead stressing the court’s myriad ties both to local Beijing society and to the empire as a whole. Second, the court was far from monolithic or static. Palace women, monks, craftsmen, educators, moralists, warriors, eunuchs, foreign envoys, and others strove to advance their interests and forge advantageous relations with the emperor and one another. Finally, these case studies illustrate the importance of individual agency. The founder’s legacy may have formed the warp of court practices and tastes, but the weft varied considerably. Reflecting the complexity of the court, the essays represent a variety of perspectives and disciplines—from intellectual, cultural, military, and political to art history and musicology."
