Download or read book Building Culture in Early Qing Yangzhou written by Tobie Sarah Meyer-Fong and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The book focuses on the previously overlooked period between the conquest and the city's commercial florescence - a moment in which Yangzhou functioned as an important center of literary culture that was consciously conceived as transregional and transdynastic. With rich detail and extensive use of literary sources, the author documents the complex social and cultural interactions through which the community reconstituted itself."--Jacket.
Download or read book Negotiating Urban Space written by Si-yen Fei and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Urbanization was central to development in late imperial China. Yet its impact is heatedly debated, although scholars agree that it triggered neither Weberian urban autonomy nor Habermasian civil society. This book argues that this conceptual impasse derives from the fact that the seemingly continuous urban expansion was in fact punctuated by a wide variety of “dynastic urbanisms.” Historians should, the author contends, view urbanization not as an automatic by-product of commercial forces but as a process shaped by institutional frameworks and cultural trends in each dynasty. This characteristic is particularly evident in the Ming. As the empire grew increasingly urbanized, the gap between the early Ming valorization of the rural and late Ming reality infringed upon the livelihood and identity of urban residents. This contradiction went almost unremarked in court forums and discussions among elites, leaving its resolution to local initiatives and negotiations. Using Nanjing—a metropolis along the Yangzi River and onetime capital of the Ming—as a central case, the author demonstrates that, prompted by this unique form of urban–rural contradiction, the actions and creations of urban residents transformed the city on multiple levels: as an urban community, as a metropolitan region, as an imagined space, and, finally, as a discursive subject."
Download or read book What Remains written by Tobie Meyer-Fong and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-27 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Taiping Rebellion was one of the costliest civil wars in human history. Many millions of people lost their lives. Yet while the Rebellion has been intensely studied by scholars in China and elsewhere, we still know little of how individuals coped with these cataclysmic events. Drawing upon a rich array of primary sources, What Remains explores the issues that preoccupied Chinese and Western survivors. Individuals, families, and communities grappled with fundamental questions of loyalty and loss as they struggled to rebuild shattered cities, bury the dead, and make sense of the horrors that they had witnessed. Driven by compelling accounts of raw emotion and deep injury, What Remains opens a window to a world described by survivors themselves. This book transforms our understanding of China's 19th century and recontextualizes suffering and loss in China during the 20th century.
Download or read book Know Your Remedies written by He Bian and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Traditional Chinese medicine has been practiced in various forms for more than a thousand years. Practitioners may heal patients with herbal remedies, acupuncture, massage, exercise, and modified diets. Even today, herbal medicines are of particular importance; Chinese pharmacies containing a vast array of remedies can be found in cities and towns the world over. This book is an interdisciplinary and cultural history of the concept of "pharmacy," both the drugs themselves and the trade in medicine, during the Ming and Qing dynasties of early modern China. This was a time of change for traditional Chinese medicine and for Chinese science as a whole. Many historians have argued that sixteenth-century China was a high point of scientific inquiry, followed by a period of intellectual decline. Though political and intellectual shifts led to a crisis of authority over pharmaceutical knowledge in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, Bian argues that this period of supposed intellectual decline was in fact characterized by numerous efforts to further refine and spread the pharmacological knowledge amassed in the Ming dynasty. She draws on a wide range of primary sources, but particularly through the study of bencao (pronounced "pen ts'ao"), a genre of encyclopaedic works, often called matteria medica or pharmacopoeia in the West, that collect information on medicinal substances. As the early modern Chinese Empire expanded and print culture became more widespread, the pursuit of medical remedies became a significant commercial enterprise. The author connects theory and practice of pharmacy during the Ming and Qing dynasties to broader developments in intellectual history, book culture, commerce, and taxation"--
Download or read book Changing Clothes in China written by Antonia Finnane and published by Hurst Publishers. This book was released on 2023-05-30 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians have long regarded fashion as something peculiarly Western. In this surprising, sumptuously illustrated book, Antonia Finnane challenges this view, which she argues is based on nineteenth- and twentieth-century representations of Chinese dress as traditional and unchanging. Fashions, she shows, were part of Chinese life in the late imperial era, even if a fashion industry was not then apparent. In the early twentieth century the key features of modern fashion became evident, particularly in Shanghai, and rapidly changing dress styles showed the effects. The volatility of Chinese dress throughout the twentieth century matched vicissitudes in national politics. Finnane describes in detail how the close-fitting jacket and high collar of the 1911 Revolutionary period, the skirt and jacket-blouse of the May Fourth era, and the military style popular in the Cultural Revolution gave way finally to the variegated, globalized wardrobe of today. She brilliantly connects China’s modernization and global visibility with changes in dress, offering a vivid portrait of the complex, subtle, and sometimes contradictory ways the people of China have worn their nation on their backs.
Download or read book The Southern Garden Poetry Society written by David B Honey and published by The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. This book was released on 2013-03-06 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What has traditionally been the main matter explored by Cantonese literati? From the earliest poets—oceanic elements and riparian scenes contrasted with stunning rock formations; a love for the exotic, especially local plants, products, and lore; Daoist transcendentalism; and, finally, a concern for pointing up local loyalty to the distant throne and a fierce pride in being culturally authentically Chinese. The Southern Garden Poetry Society in Guangzhou was the only major literary club in Chinese history to be periodically reconvened over the Ming, Qing, and Republican eras. Beginning with an examination of its five founding members during the Yuan / Ming transition period, in particular Sun Fen (1335–1393), David Honey traces the various elements of this Southern Muse that became embodied in later Cantonese poetry, and pursues the issue of social memory by focusing on later reconvenings of the society.
Download or read book A Court on Horseback written by Michael G Chang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 574 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Between 1751 and 1784, the Qianlong emperor embarked upon six southern tours, traveling from Beijing to Jiangnan and back. These tours were exercises in political theater that took the Manchu emperor through one of the Qing empire’s most prosperous regions. This study elucidates the tensions and the constant negotiations characterizing the relationship between the imperial center and Jiangnan, which straddled the two key provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Politically, economically, and culturally, Jiangnan was the undisputed center of the Han Chinese world; it also remained a bastion of Ming loyalism and anti-Manchu sentiment. How did the Qing court constitute its authority and legitimate its domination over this pivotal region? What were the precise terms and historical dynamics of Qing rule over China proper during the long eighteenth century? In the course of addressing such questions, this study also explores the political culture within and through which High Qing rule was constituted and contested by a range of actors, all of whom operated within socially and historically structured contexts. The author argues that the southern tours occupied a central place in the historical formation of Qing rule during a period of momentous change affecting all strata of the eighteenth-century polity."
Download or read book Hua Yan 1682 1756 and the Making of the Artist in Early Modern China written by Kristen L. Chiem and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-25 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hua Yan (1682-1756) and the Making of the Artist in Early Modern China explores the relationships between the artist, local society, and artistic practice during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). Arranged as an investigation of the artist Hua Yan’s work at a pivotal moment in eighteenth-century society, this book considers his paintings and poetry in early eighteenth-century Hangzhou, mid-eighteenth-century Yangzhou, and finally their nineteenth-century afterlife in Shanghai. By investigating Hua Yan’s struggle as a marginalized artist—both at his time and in the canon of Chinese art—this study draws attention to the implications of seeing and being seen as an artist in early modern China.
Download or read book Qing Governors and Their Provinces written by R. Kent Guy and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2015-08-03 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the province emerged as an important element in the management of the expanding Chinese empire, with governors -- those in charge of these increasingly influential administrative units -- playing key roles. R. Kent Guy’s comprehensive study of this shift concentrates on the governorship system during the reigns of the Shunzhi, Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong emperors, who ruled China from 1644 to 1796. In the preceding Ming dynasty (1368–1644), the responsibilities of provincial officials were ill-defined and often shifting; Qing governors, in contrast, were influential members of a formal administrative hierarchy and enjoyed the support of the central government, including access to resources. These increasingly powerful officials extended the court’s influence into even the most distant territories of the Qing empire. Both masters of the routine processes of administration and troubleshooters for the central government, Qing governors were economic and political administrators who played crucial roles in the management of a larger and more complex empire than the Chinese had ever known. Administrative concerns varied from region to region: Henan was dominated by the great Yellow River, which flowed through the province; the Shandong governor dealt with the exchange of goods, ideas, and officials along the Grand Canal; in Zhili, relations between civilians and bannermen in the strategically significant coastal plain were key; and in northwestern Shanxi, governors dealt with border issues. Qing Governors and Their Provinces uses the records of governors’ appointments and the laws and practices that shaped them to reconstruct the development of the office of provincial governor and to examine the histories of governors’ appointments in each province. Interwoven throughout is colorful detail drawn from the governors’ biographies.
Download or read book The Peking Gazette in Late Imperial China written by Emily Mokros and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2021-05-20 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), China experienced far greater access to political information than suggested by the blunt measures of control and censorship employed by modern Chinese regimes. A tenuous partnership between the court and the dynamic commercial publishing enterprises of late imperial China enabled the publication of gazettes in a wide range of print and manuscript formats. For both domestic and foreign readers these official gazettes offered vital information about the Qing state and its activities, transmitting state news across a vast empire and beyond. And the most essential window onto Qing politics was the Peking Gazette, a genre that circulated globally over the course of the dynasty. This illuminating study presents a comprehensive history of the Peking Gazette and frames it as the cornerstone of a Qing information policy that, paradoxically, prized both transparency and secrecy. Gazettes gave readers a glimpse into the state’s inner workings but also served as a carefully curated form of public relations. Historian Emily Mokros draws from international archives to reconstruct who read the gazette and how they used it to guide their interactions with the Chinese state. Her research into the Peking Gazette’s evolution over more than two centuries is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the relationship between media, information, and state power.
Download or read book Superstitious Regimes written by Rebecca Nodostup and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "We live in a world shaped by secularism—the separation of numinous power from political authority and religion from the political, social, and economic realms of public life. Not only has progress toward modernity often been equated with secularization, but when religion is admitted into modernity, it has been distinguished from superstition. That such ideas are continually contested does not undercut their extraordinary influence. These divisions underpin this investigation of the role of religion in the construction of modernity and political power during the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937) of Nationalist rule in China. This book explores the modern recategorization of religious practices and people and examines how state power affected the religious lives and physical order of local communities. It also looks at how politicians conceived of their own ritual role in an era when authority was meant to derive from popular sovereignty. The claims of secular nationalism and mobilizational politics prompted the Nationalists to conceive of the world of religious association as a dangerous realm of “superstition” that would destroy the nation. This is the first “superstitious regime” of the book’s title. It also convinced them that national feeling and faith in the party-state would replace those ties—the second “superstitious regime.”"
Download or read book Curating Revolution written by Denise Y. Ho and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Curating Revolution examines how Mao-era exhibitions shaped popular understandings of, and participation in, the political campaigns of China's Communist revolution.
Download or read book One Country Two Societies written by Martin K. Whyte and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-25 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A collection of essays that analyzes China's foremost social cleavage: the rural-urban gap. It examines the historical background of rural-urban relations; the size and trend in the income gap between rural and urban residents; aspects of inequality apart from income; and, experiences of discrimination, particularly among urban migrants." -- BOOK PUBLISHER WEBSITE.
Download or read book Our Great Qing written by Johan Elverskog and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2008-07-31 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In a sweeping overview of four centuries of Mongolian history that draws on previously untapped sources, Johan Elverskog opens up totally new perspectives on some of the most urgent questions historians have recently raised about the role of Buddhism in the constitution of the Qing empire. Theoretically informed and strongly comparative in approach, Elverskog’s work tells a fascinating and important story that will interest all scholars working at the intersection of religion and politics." —Mark Elliott, Harvard University "Johan Elverskog has rewritten the political and intellectual history of Mongolia from the bottom up, telling a convincing story that clarifies for the first time the revolutions which Mongolian concepts of community, rule, and religion underwent from 1500 to 1900. His account of Qing rule in Mongolia doesn’t just tell us what images the Qing emperors wished to project, but also what images the Mongols accepted themselves, and how these changed over the centuries. In the scope of time it covers, the originality of the views advanced, and the accuracy of the scholarship upon which it is based, Our Great Qing seems destined to mark a watershed in Mongolian studies. It will be essential reading for specialists in Mongolian studies and will make an important contribution and riposte to the ‘new Qing history’ now changing the face of late imperial Chinese history. Specialists in Tibetan Buddhism and Buddhism’s interaction with the political realm will also find in this work challenging and thought-provoking." —ChristopherAtwood, Indiana University Although it is generally believed that the Manchus controlled the Mongols through their patronage of Tibetan Buddhism, scant attention has been paid to the Mongol view of the Qing imperial project. In contrast to other accounts of Manchu rule, Our Great Qing focuses not only on what images the metropole wished to project into Mongolia, but also on what images the Mongols acknowledged themselves. Rather than accepting the Manchu’s use of Buddhism, Johan Elverskog begins by questioning the static, unhistorical, and hegemonic view of political life implicit in the Buddhist explanation. By stressing instead the fluidity of identity and Buddhist practice as processes continually developing in relation to state formations, this work explores how Qing policies were understood by Mongols and how they came to see themselves as Qing subjects. In his investigation of Mongol society on the eve of the Manchu conquest, Elverskog reveals the distinctive political theory of decentralization that fostered the civil war among the Mongols. He explains how it was that the Manchu Great Enterprise was not to win over "Mongolia" but was instead to create a unified Mongol community of which the disparate preexisting communities would merely be component parts. A key element fostering this change was the Qing court’s promotion of Gelukpa orthodoxy, which not only transformed Mongol historical narratives and rituals but also displaced the earlier vernacular Mongolian Buddhism. Finally, Elverskog demonstrates how this eighteenth-century conception of a Mongol community, ruled by an aristocracy and nourished by a Buddhist emperor, gave way to a pan-Qing solidarity of all Buddhist peoples against Muslims and Christians and to local identities that united for the first time aristocrats with commoners in a new Mongol Buddhist identity on the eve of the twentieth century.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature From 1375 written by Kang-i Sun Chang and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 830 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stephen Owen is James Bryant Conant Professor of Chinese at Harvard University. --Book Jacket.
Download or read book The Cornucopian Stage written by Ariel Fox and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-09-09 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long seventeenth century in China was a period of tremendous commercial expansion, and no literary genre was better equipped to articulate its possibilities than southern drama. As a form and a practice, southern drama was in the business of world-building—both in its structural imperative to depict and reconcile the social whole and in its creation of entire economies dependent on its publication and performance. However, the early modern commercial world repelled rather than engaged most playwrights, who consigned its totems—the merchant and his money—to the margins as sources of political suspicion and cultural anxiety. In The Cornucopian Stage, Ariel Fox examines a body of influential yet understudied plays by a circle of Suzhou playwrights who enlisted the theatrical imaginary to very different ends. In plays about long-distance traders and small-time peddlers, impossible bargains and broken contracts, strings of cash and storehouses of silver, the Suzhou circle placed commercial forms not only at center stage but at the center of a new world coming into being. Here, Fox argues, the economic character of early modern selfhood is recast as fundamentally productive—as the basis for new subject positions, new kinds of communities, and new modes of art.
Download or read book Male Friendship in Ming China written by Martin Huang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first interdisciplinary effort to study friendship in late imperial China from the perspective of gender history. Friendship was valorized with unprecedented enthusiasm in Ming China (1368-1644). Some Ming literati even proposed that friendship was the most fundamental relationship among the so-called “five cardinal human relationships”. Why the cult of friendship in Ming China? How was male friendship theorized, practiced and represented during that period? These are some of the questions the current volume deals with. Coming from different disciplines (history, musicology and literary studies), the contributors thoroughly explore the complexities and the gendered nature of friendship in Ming China. This volume has also been published as a special theme issue of Brill's journal NAN NÜ, Men, Women and Gender in China.
