Download or read book Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China written by N. Harry Rothschild and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2018-10-31 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China presents a rogues’ gallery of treacherous regicides, impious monks, cutthroat underlings, ill-bred offspring, and disloyal officials. It plumbs the dark matter of the human condition, placing front and center transgressive individuals and groups traditionally demonized by Confucian annalists and largely shunned by modern scholars. The work endeavors to apprehend the actions and motivations of these men and women, whose conduct deviated from normative social, cultural, and religious expectations. Early chapters examine how core Confucian bonds such as those between parents and children, and ruler and minister, were compromised, even severed. The living did not always reverently pay homage to the dead, children did not honor their parents with due filiality, a decorous distance was not necessarily observed between sons and stepmothers, and subjects often pursued their own interests before those of the ruler or the state. The elasticity of ritual and social norms is explored: Chapters on brazen Eastern Han (25–220) mourners and deviant calligraphers, audacious falconers, volatile Tang (618–907) Buddhist monks, and drunken Song (960–1279) literati reveal social norms treated not as universal truths but as debated questions of taste wherein political and social expedience both determined and highlighted individual roles within larger social structures and defined what was and was not aberrant. A Confucian predilection to “valorize [the] civil and disparage the martial” and Buddhist proscriptions on killing led literati and monks alike to condemn the cruelty and chaos of war. The book scrutinizes cultural attitudes toward military action and warfare, including those surrounding the bloody and capricious world of the Zuozhuan (Chronicle of Zuo), the relentless violence of the Five Dynasties and Ten States periods (907–979), and the exploits of Tang warrior priests—a series of studies that complicates the rhetoric by situating it within the turbulent realities of the times. By the end of this volume, readers will come away with the understanding that behaving badly in early and medieval China was not about morality but perspective, politics, and power.
Download or read book The Emperor s Feast written by Jonathan Clements and published by Hodder & Stoughton. This book was released on 2021-02-11 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A galloping journey through thousands of years of Chinese culinary history . . . a timely reminder that the country's modern cuisine is the delicious fruit of a rich, ancient and perhaps surprisingly multicultural tradition' FUCHSIA DUNLOP, SPECTATOR 'A tasty portrait of a nation' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'A splendid introduction to the complex history of China' GUARDIAN 'A terrific read . . . Jonathan Clements writes with erudition and humour' DAILY MAIL 'This book is itself a feast, each chapter a sumptuous course' Frederik L. Schodt, author of My Heart Sutra 'Witty and insightful' Derek Sandhaus, author of Drunk in China **************** The history of China - not according to emperors or battles, but according to its food and drink. The Emperor's Feast is the epic story of a nation and a people, told through one of its most fundamental pillars and successful exports: food. Following the journeys of different ingredients, dishes and eating habits over 5,000 years of history, author and presenter Jonathan Clements examines how China's political, cultural and technological evolution and her remarkable entrance onto the world stage have impacted how the Chinese - and the rest of the world - eat, drink and cook. We see the influence of invaders such as the Mongols and the Manchus, and discover how food - like the fiery cuisine of Sichuan or the hardy dishes of the north - often became a stand-in for regional and national identities. We also follow Chinese flavours to the shores of Europe and America, where enterprising chefs and home cooks created new traditions and dishes unheard of in the homeland. From dim sum to mooncakes to General Tso's chicken, The Emperor's Feast shows us that the story of Chinese food is ultimately the story of a nation: not just the one that history tells us, but also the one that China tells us about itself.
Download or read book Worldly Saviors and Imperial Authority in Medieval Chinese Buddhism written by April D. Hughes and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2021-05-31 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although scholars have long assumed that early Chinese political authority was rooted in Confucianism, rulership in the medieval period was not bound by a single dominant tradition. To acquire power, emperors deployed objects and figures derived from a range of traditions imbued with religious and political significance. Author April D. Hughes demonstrates how dynastic founders like Wu Zhao (Wu Zetian, r. 690–705), the only woman to rule China under her own name, and Yang Jian (Emperor Wen, r. 581–604), the first ruler of the Sui dynasty, closely identified with Buddhist worldly saviors and Wheel-Turning Kings to legitimate their rule. During periods of upheaval caused by the decline of the Dharma, worldly saviors arrived on earth to quell chaos and to rule and liberate their subjects simultaneously. By incorporating these figures into the imperial system, sovereigns were able to depict themselves both as monarchs and as buddhas or bodhisattvas in uncertain times. In this inventive and original work, Hughes traces worldly saviors—in particular Maitreya Buddha and Prince Moonlight—as they appeared in apocalyptic scriptures from Dunhuang, claims to the throne made by various rebel leaders, and textual interpretations and assertions by Yang Jian and Wu Zhao. Yang Jian associated himself with Prince Moonlight and took on the persona of a Wheel-Turning King whose offerings to the Buddha were not flowers and incense but weapons of war to reunite a long-fragmented empire and revitalize the Dharma. Wu Zhao was associated with several different worldly savior figures. In addition, she saw herself as the incarnation of a Wheel-Turning King for whom it was said the Seven Treasures manifested as material representations of his right to rule. Wu Zhao duly had the Seven Treasures created and put on display whenever she held audiences at court. The worldly savior figure allowed rulers to inhabit the highest role in the religious realm along with the supreme role in the political sphere. This incorporation transformed notions of Chinese imperial sovereignty, and associating rulers with a buddha or bodhisattva continued long after the close of the medieval period.
Download or read book Memory and Agency in Ancient China written by Francis Allard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-20 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Applies the 'life history' of objects approach to China's prehistoric, early dynastic and more recent material culture.
Download or read book Performing Filial Piety in Northern Song China written by Cong Ellen Zhang and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2020-09-30 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Educated men in Song-dynasty China (960–1279) traveled frequently in search of scholarly and bureaucratic success. These extensive periods of physical mobility took them away from their families, homes, and native places for long periods of time, preventing them from fulfilling their most sacred domestic duty: filial piety to their parents. In this deeply grounded work, Ellen Zhang locates the tension between worldly ambition and family duty at the heart of elite social and cultural life. Drawing on more than 2,000 funerary biographies and other official and private writing, Zhang argues that the predicament in which Song literati found themselves diminished neither the importance of filial piety nor the appeal of participating in examinations and government service. On the contrary, the Northern Song witnessed unprecedented literati activity and state involvement in the bolstering of ancient forms of filial performances and the promotion of new ones. The result was the triumph of a new filial ideal: luyang. By labeling highly coveted honors and privileges attainable solely through scholarly and official accomplishments as the most celebrated filial acts, the luyang rhetoric elevated office-holding men to be the most filial of sons. Consequently, the proper performance of filiality became essential to scholar-official identity and self-representation. Zhang convincingly demonstrates that this reconfiguration of elite male filiality transformed filial piety into a status- and gender-based virtue, a change that had wide implications for elite family life and relationships in the Northern Song. The separation of elite men from their parents and homes also made the idea of “native place” increasingly fluid. This development in turn generated an interest in family preservation as filial performance. Individually initiated, kinship- and native place-based projects flourished and coalesced with the moral and cultural visions of leading scholar-intellectuals, providing the social and familial foundations for the ascendancy of Neo-Confucianism as well as new cultural norms that transformed Chinese society in the Song and beyond.
Download or read book Literate Community in Early Imperial China written by Charles Sanft and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2019-05-01 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through an examination of archaeologically recovered texts from China’s northwestern border regions, argues for widespread interaction with texts in the Han period. This book examines ancient written materials from China’s northwestern border regions to offer fresh insights into the role of text in shaping society and culture during the Han period (206/2 BCE–220 CE). Left behind by military installations, these documents—wooden strips and other nontraditional textual materials such as silk—recorded the lives and activities of military personnel and the people around them. Charles Sanft explores their functions and uses by looking at a fascinating array of material, including posted texts on signaling across distances, practical texts on brewing beer and evaluating swords, and letters exchanged by officials working in low rungs of the bureaucracy. By focusing on all members of the community, he argues that a much broader section of early society had meaningful interactions with text than previously believed. This major shift in interpretation challenges long-standing assumptions about the limited range of influence that text and literacy had on culture and society and makes important contributions to early China studies, the study of literacy, and to the global history of non-elites. “Sanft’s analysis fills out what is still a rather sparse picture of life in non-elite, nonofficial social circles. For the first time ever, we learn how women might have been included in a literate community along the ancient northwestern frontier, and we also learn how soldiers and other members of the uneducated or semiliterate public made use of the extensive knowledge that texts conveyed in their work and lives. None of this information is apparent from traditionally received texts. Sanft therefore does the field a great favor by systematically laying the foundations for a broader understanding of all levels of society, as well as an understanding of how these levels interconnect through systems of knowledge expressed through text.” — Erica Fox Brindley, author of Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern Frontier, c. 400 BCE–50 CE
Download or read book Middle Imperial China 900 1350 written by Linda Walton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-03 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A highly readable and engaging survey of China's history from the tenth through the mid-fourteenth centuries.
Download or read book The East Asian World System written by Eugene N. Anderson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies the East Asian world-system and its dynastic cycles as they were influenced by climate and demographic change, diseases, the expansion of trade, and the rise of science and technology. By studying the history of East Asia until the beginning of the 20th century and offering a comparative perspective on East Asian countries, including China, Japan and Korea, it describes the historical evolution of the East Asian world-system as being the result of good or poor management of the respective populations and environments. Lastly, the book discusses how the East Asian regions have become integrated into a single world-system by a combination of trade, commerce, and military action. Given its scope, the book will appeal to scholars of history, sociology, political science and environmental studies, and to anyone interested in learning about the effects of climate change on the dynamic development of societies.
Download or read book The Origin of East Asian Medieval Capital Construction System written by Niu Runzhen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ye is a historical Chinese city built in 659 BC and burned down to the ground in AD 580. The book investigates the characteristics of the city’s layout and its deep influence on the urban construction in East Asia since the 6th century AD. By studying archaeological findings and historical documents, the author illustrates the historical significance of Ye city, both as capital for six dynasties over 370 years of ancient Chinese history and as a paragon of East Asian capital planning. Ye serves as an exemplary model for famous capitals in later dynasties of imperial China, such as Beijing and Xi’an. Its influence also extends to other East Asian capitals, including Seoul in Korea, Kyoto in Japan, and Hanoi in Vietnam. Comparing the archetypical structure of Ye city and the features of its East Asian descendants, the author encapsulates the lineage of capital city development across medieval East Asia and uncovers a philosophy of construction that rests upon traditional Chinese thinking. The book will be an essential read for scholars and general readers interested in East Asian heritage, urbanology, and architecture, as well as a useful reference for urban planners willing to learn from historical experience.
Download or read book Dao Companion to China s fa Tradition written by Yuri Pines and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 686 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Saying All That Can Be Said written by Keith McMahon and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-09-09 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Saying All That Can Be Said, Keith McMahon presents the first full analysis of the sexually explicit portrayals in the Ming novel Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅 (The Plum in the Golden Vase). Countering common views of those portrayals as “just sex” or as “bad sex,” he shows that they are rich in thematic meaning and loaded with social and aesthetic purpose. McMahon places the novel in the historical context of Chinese sexual culture, from which Jin Ping Mei inherits the style of the elegant, metaphorical description of erotic pleasure, but which the anonymous author extends in an exploration of the explicit, the obscene, and the graphic. The novel uses explicit description to evaluate and comment on characters, situations, and sexual and psychic states of being. Echoing the novel’s way of taking sex as a vehicle for reading the world, McMahon celebrates the richness and exuberance of Jin Ping Mei’s language of sex, which refuses imprisonment within the boundaries of orthodox culture’s cleanly authoritative style, and which continues to inspire admiration from readers around the world. Saying All That Can Be Said will change the way we think about sexual culture in premodern China.
Download or read book Sexuality in China written by Howard Chiang and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2018-06-15 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was sex like in China, from imperial times through the post-Mao era? The answer depends, of course, on who was having sex, where they were located in time and place, and what kind of familial, social, and political structures they participated in. This collection offers a variety of perspectives by addressing diverse topics such as polygamy, pornography, free love, eugenics, sexology, crimes of passion, homosexuality, intersexuality, transsexuality, masculine anxiety, sex work, and HIV/AIDS. Following a loose chronological sequence, the chapters examine revealing historical moments in which human desire and power dynamics came into play. Collectively, the contributors undertake a necessary historiographic intervention by reconsidering Western categorizations and exploring Chinese understandings of sexuality and erotic orientation.
Download or read book Nominal Things written by Jeffrey Moser and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-03-31 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction -- Part I. The lexical picture. Names as implements; Picturing names -- Part II. The empirical impression. The style of antiquity; Agents of change; Nominal empiricism -- Part III. The schematic thing. Substance into schema; Nominal casting -- Conclusion.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Religion and War written by Margo Kitts and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-11 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion offers a global, comparative history of the interplay between religion and war from ancient times to the present. Moving beyond sensationalist theories that seek to explain why 'religion causes war,' the volume takes a thoughtful look at the connection between religion and war through a variety of lenses - historical, literary, and sociological-as well as the particular features of religious war. The twenty-three carefully nuanced and historically grounded chapters comprehensively examine the religious foundations for war, classical just war doctrines, sociological accounts of religious nationalism, and featured conflicts that illustrate interdisciplinary expressions of the intertwining of religion and war. Written by a distinguished, international team of scholars, whose essays were specially commissioned for this volume, The Cambridge Companion to Religion and War will be an indispensable resource for students and scholars of the history and sociology of religion and war, as well as other disciplines.
Download or read book Record of the Listener written by Hong Mai and published by Hackett Publishing. This book was released on 2018-03-02 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Scholars who know classical Chinese have been reading and citing Hon Mai's wonderful collection for many years. Now students can access these informative materials through Zhang's lively English translations. They are both fun to read and deeply informative about daily life, religion, markets, and multiple social groups in the twelfth century. The comprehensive thematic guide allows readers to locate tales by subject matter, making this collection of 100 narratives ideal for classroom use." —Valerie Hansen, Yale University
Download or read book The Art and Archaeology of Human Engagements with Birds of Prey written by Robert J. Wallis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-10-05 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of all avian groups, birds of prey in particular have long been a prominent subject of fascination in many human societies. This book demonstrates that the art and materiality of human engagements with raptors has been significant through deep time and across the world, from earliest prehistory to Indigenous thinking in the present day. Drawing on a wide range of global case studies and a plurality of complementary perspectives, it explores the varied and fluid dynamics between humans and birds of prey as evidenced in this diverse art-historical and archaeological record. From their depictions as powerful beings in visual art and their important roles in Indigenous mythologies, to the significance of their body parts as active agents in religious rituals, the intentional deposition of their faunal remains and the display of their preserved bodies in museums, there is no doubt that birds of prey have been figures of great import for the shaping of human society and culture. However, several of the chapters in this volume are particularly concerned with looking beyond the culturenature dichotomy and human-centred accounts to explore perspectival and other post-humanist thinking on humanraptor ontologies and epistemologies. The contributors recognize that humanraptor relationships are not driven exclusively by human intentionality, and that when these species meet they relate-to and become-with one another. This 'raptor-with-human'-focused approach allows for a productive re-framing of questions about humanraptor interstices, enables fresh thinking about established evidence and offers signposts for present and future intra-actions with birds of prey.
Download or read book The Routledge International Handbook of Morality Cognition and Emotion in China written by Ryan Nichols and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ground-breaking handbook provides multi-disciplinary insight into Chinese morality, cognition and emotion by collecting in one place a comprehensive collection of essays focused on Chinese morality by world-leading experts from more than a dozen different academic fields of study. Through fifteen substantive chapters, readers are offered a holistic look into the ways morality could be interpreted in China, and a broad range of theoretical perspectives, including ecological, anthropological and cultural neuroscience. Offering a syncretic, multi-disciplinary overview that moves beyond the usual western-oriented perspective of China as a monolithic culture, research questions addressed in this book focus on morality as represented at the level of the individual, rather than at the group or institutional levels. Research questions explored herein include: What are the major contours of distinctively Chinese morality? What was the role of the ancient ecology, climate, and pathogen load in producing Chinese moral attitudes and emotions? Are ingredients of the good life in China different than ingredients of the good life elsewhere? How are children in China morally educated? How do findings from cultural neuroscience help us understand differences in the treatment of family members, or the treatment of strangers, in China and elsewhere? How do the protests in Hong Kong participate in, or stand apart from, the ongoing ethics of protest in historical China? The clear structure and accessible writing offer a rigorous assessment of the ways in which morality can be interpreted, shedding light on differences between China and Western cultures. The book also provides a timely window into Chinese forms of morality, and the pivotal role these play in social organization, family relationships, systems of government, emotion and cognition. Representing fields of study ranging from philosophy, linguistics, archaeology, history, and religion, to social psychology, neuroscience, clinical psychology, developmental psychology, and behavioral ecology, this is an essential text for students, academics, and others with wide interest in Chinese culture.
