Download or read book Chinese Funerary Biographies written by Patricia Buckley Ebrey and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2019-12-13 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tens of thousands of epitaphs, or funerary biographies, survive from imperial China. Engraved on stone and placed in a grave, they typically focus on the deceased’s biography and exemplary words and deeds, expressing the survivors’ longing for the dead. These epitaphs provide glimpses of the lives of women, men who did not leave a mark politically, and children—people who are not well documented in more conventional sources such as dynastic histories and local gazetteers. This anthology of translations makes available funerary biographies covering nearly two thousand years, from the Han dynasty through the nineteenth century, selected for their value as teaching material for courses in Chinese history, literature, and women’s studies as well as world history. Because they include revealing details about personal conduct, families, local conditions, and social, cultural, and religious practices, these epitaphs illustrate ways of thinking and the realities of daily life. Most can be read and analyzed on multiple levels, and they stimulate investigation of topics such as the emotional tenor of family relations, rituals associated with death, Confucian values, women’s lives as written about by men, and the use of sources assumed to be biased. These biographies will be especially effective when combined with more readily available primary sources such as official documents, religious and intellectual discourses, and anecdotal stories, promising to generate provocative discussion of literary genre, the ways historians use sources, and how writers shape their accounts.
Download or read book Chinese Chinese Autobiographical Writing written by Patricia Buckley Ebrey and published by . This book was released on 2023-01-03 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Chinese Funerary Biographies written by Patricia Buckley Ebrey and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Tens of thousands of epitaphs or funerary biographies survive from imperial China. Written to be engraved on stone and placed in a grave, they typically focus on the deceased's biographical information and exemplary words and deeds, expressing survivors' longing for the dead. Epitaphs provide glimpses of the lives of people who are not well-documented in such sources as the dynastic histories and local gazetteers: women, men who did not leave a mark politically, and children. This anthology makes available a set of funerary biographies covering nearly two thousand years of history, from the Han dynasty through the nineteenth century, selected for their potential as teaching material for courses on Chinese history, literature, and women's studies as well as world history. Funerary biographies, due to their inclusion of telling details about personal conduct, family life, local conditions, and social, cultural, and religious practices, can illustrate ways of thinking and the realities of daily life. Since most funerary biographies can be read and analyzed on multiple levels, they have the potential to stimulate discussion of topics such as the emotional tenor of family life, rituals associated with death, whether the values seen in these biographies should be called Confucian, ways to analyze women's lives from sources written by men, and how to use sources that can be assumed to be biased. These biographies will be especially effective when combined with more readily available primary sources such as official documents, religious and intellectual discourses, and anecdotal stories, promising to generate interesting discussion about literary genre, the ways historians use sources, and how writers shape their accounts"--
Download or read book Biographies of Immortals Legends of China Special Edition written by Herbert A. Giles and published by Special Edition Books. This book was released on 2010-02 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This special edition brings together three classic works by Western scholars of ancient Chinese texts. "China and Manchus" by Herbert Giles, "Leaves from My Chinese Scrapbook" by Frederic Balfour, "Biographies of Immortals" by Lionel Giles.
Download or read book The Destruction of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy written by Nicolas Tackett and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians have long been perplexed by the complete disappearance of the medieval Chinese aristocracy by the tenth century—the “great clans” that had dominated China for centuries. In this book, Nicolas Tackett resolves the enigma of their disappearance, using new, digital methodologies to analyze a dazzling array of sources. Tackett systematically mines thousands of funerary biographies excavated in recent decades—most of them never before examined by scholars—while taking full advantage of the explanatory power of Geographic Information System (GIS) methods and social network analysis. Tackett supplements these analyses with extensive anecdotes culled from epitaphs, prose literature, and poetry, bringing to life women and men who lived a millennium in the past. The Destruction of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy demonstrates that the great Tang aristocratic families adapted to the social, economic, and institutional transformations of the seventh and eighth centuries far more successfully than previously believed. Their political influence collapsed only after a large number were killed during three decades of extreme violence following Huang Chao’s sack of the capital cities in 880 CE. 2015 James Breasted Prize, American Historical Association
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, Cong Ellen Zhang locates the tension between worldly ambition and family duty at the heart of elite social and cultural life. Drawing on more than two thousand 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 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: Memory and Agency in Ancient China offers a novel perspective on China's material culture. The volume explores the complex 'life histories' of selected objects, whose trajectories as ginle objects ('biographies') and object types ('lineages') cut across both temporal and physical space. The essays, written by a team of international scholars, analyse the objects in an effort to understand how they were shaped by the constraints of their social, political and aesthetic contexts, just as they were also guided by individual preference and capricious memory. They also demonstrate how objects were capable of effecting change. Ranging chronologically from the Neolithic to the present, and spatially from northern to southern mainland China and Taiwan, this book highlights the varied approaches that archaeologists and art historians use when attempting to reconstruct object trajectories. It also showcases the challenges they face, particularly with the unearthing of objects from archaeological contexts that, paradoxically, come to represent the earliest known point of their 'post-recovery lives'.
Download or read book Women Gender and Sexuality in China written by Ping Yao and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women, Gender and Sexuality in China: A Brief History serves as a focal textbook for undergraduate courses on women, gender, and sexuality in Chinese history. Thematically structured, it surveys important aspects of gender systems and gender practices throughout Chinese history, from the earliest period to the modern era. Topics include the concept of yin-yang, life course and gender roles, kinship systems and family structure, marriage practices, sexuality, women’s work and daily life, as well as gender in Chinese mythology, religions, medicine, art, and literature. In narrating how various traditions and practices were formed and evolved throughout Chinese history, this textbook draws heavily on personal stories and historical records. Features in this textbook include: Primary source sections for each chapter, introducing students to types of documents that have been used by scholars in conducting research Thirty-three translated texts of various genres, including epitaph, bronze inscription, medical text, imperial edict, legal case, family letter, ghost story, divorce paper, poetry, autobiography, etc. Dedicated biography sections for five distinguished women Offering richly layered accounts of women, gender, and sexuality, this textbook is essential reading for students of Chinese history, gender in world history, or the comparative history of gender.
Download or read book Arranged Companions written by Weijing Lu and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2021-07-22 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although commonly associated with patriarchal oppression, arranged marriages have adapted over the centuries to changing cultural norms and the lived experiences of men and women. In Arranged Companions, historian Weijing Lu chronicles how marital behaviors during the early and High Qing (mid-seventeenth through mid-nineteenth centuries) were informed by rich and complex traditions and mediated by the historical conditions of the period, during which marital affection was celebrated as a basic ingredient of an ideal marriage. Lu finds public representation and private communication of marital affection in personal records, including poetry, biographies, letters, and memoirs. During this unique historical moment, ideals of marital companionship and love came to fruition while social changes also created new tensions for couples and extended families. Offering surprising revelations about conjugal relations during this time of change, Arranged Companions raises provocative questions about the cultural construction of intimacy and the meaning of a “happy marriage.”
Download or read book Gender and Friendship in Chinese Literature written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-09-26 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Canvasing a range of materials that include early tales of exemplarity, medieval song lyrics, Ming-Qing poetry and plucked rhymes, twentieth century writings about revolutionaries, opera stars, missionaries, and contemporary fiction, this volume illustrates the discourse and representation of friendship in which women gain agency and participate in broader arguments about ethics, politics, and religious transcendence. Friendship prompts reflections on gender roles, becomes the venue of literary self-consciousness, and heightens the sense of literary community. Gender and community function in new ways through the public dimension of friendship, and most importantly, the intersections of gender and friendship enable us to rethink other relationships.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Chinese History written by Michael Dillon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 1223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China has become accessible to the west in the last twenty years in a way that was not possible in the previous thirty. The number of westerners travelling to China to study, for business or for tourism has increased dramatically and there has been a corresponding increase in interest in Chinese culture, society and economy and increasing coverage of contemporary China in the media. Our understanding of China’s history has also been evolving. The study of history in the People’s Republic of China during the Mao Zedong period was strictly regulated and primary sources were rarely available to westerners or even to most Chinese historians. Now that the Chinese archives are open to researchers, there is a growing body of academic expertise on history in China that is open to western analysis and historical methods. This has in many ways changed the way that Chinese history, particularly the modern period, is viewed. The Encyclopedia of Chinese History covers the entire span of Chinese history from the period known primarily through archaeology to the present day. Treating Chinese history in the broadest sense, the Encyclopedia includes coverage of the frontier regions of Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet that have played such an important role in the history of China Proper and will also include material on Taiwan, and on the Chinese diaspora. In A-Z format with entries written by experts in the field of Chinese Studies, the Encyclopedia will be an invaluable resource for students of Chinese history, politics and culture.
Download or read book Under Confucian Eyes written by Susan Mann and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This important volume adds a significant number of new and unique materials for teachers at all levels of higher education to use in classroom and seminar discussion about the issues of gender, society, and religion in imperial China."--Benjamin Elman, author of A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China "The eighteen primary documents in this anthology, all of them translated for the first time, provide a rich array of sources on the lives of women in China's past. The anthology is important not only for the selection of documents but for the ways it suggests we can think about, and find sources about, women in China. It is must reading for scholars and students alike."--Ann Waltner, author of The World of a Late Ming Visionary: T'an-Yang-Tzu and Her Followers
Download or read book One Who Knows Me written by Anna Shields and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The friendships of writers of the mid-Tang era (780s–820s)—between literary giants like Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen, Han Yu and Meng Jiao, Liu Zongyuan and Liu Yuxi—became famous through the many texts they wrote to and about one another. What inspired mid-Tang literati to write about their friendships with such zeal? And how did these writings influence Tang literary culture more broadly? In One Who Knows Me, the first book to delve into friendship in medieval China, Anna M. Shields explores the literature of the mid-Tang to reveal the complex value its writers discovered in friendship—as a rewarding social practice, a rich literary topic, a way to negotiate literati identity, and a path toward self-understanding. Shields traces the evolution of the performance of friendship through a wide range of genres, including letters, prefaces, exchange poetry, and funerary texts, and interweaves elegant translations with close readings of these texts. For mid-Tang literati, writing about friendship became a powerful way to write about oneself and to reflect upon a shared culture. Their texts reveal the ways that friendship intersected the public and private realms of experience and, in the process, reshaped both.
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 Treatises of the Supervisor and Guardian of the Cinnamon Sea written by Fan Chengda and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fan Chengda (1126-1193) was a high-ranking Chinese government official in Guangxi, an experienced traveler, a keen observer, and a gifted writer. His observations on a wide range of subjects are always interesting and revealing, and constitute an important contribution to the literature on Song dynasty China’s frontier peoples. Originally written in direct, unadorned, and allusion-free classical Chinese prose, the complete and annotated English translation of Treatises of the Supervisor and Guardian of the Cinnamon Sea (Guihai yuheng zhi) captures its charm and significance.
Download or read book Religion and Biography in China and Tibet written by Benjamin Penny and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-05 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chinese and Tibetan traditions value biography as a primary historiographical and literary genre. This volume analyses biographies as texts, taking seriously the literary turn in historical and religious studies and applying some of its insights to an understudied but central corpus of material in Chinese and Tibetan religion.
Download or read book The Edge of Knowing written by Roy Bing Chan and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals the historical impact of dream rhetoric on Chinese modernity and nation-building Realism and the rhetoric of dreams intersected in modern Chinese literature from the May Fourth Era in the early twentieth century through the period just following the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. The Edge of Knowing investigates this relationship, showing how writers’ attention to dreams demonstrates the multiple influences of Western psychology, utopian desire for revolutionary change, and the enduring legacy of traditional Chinese philosophy. At the same time, modern Chinese writers used their work to represent social reality for the purpose of nation building. Recent political usage of dream rhetoric in the People’s Republic of China attests to the continuing influence of dreams on the imagination of Chinese modernity. By employing a number of critical perspectives, The Edge of Knowing will appeal to readers seeking to understand the complicated relationship between literary form and Chinese history and politics.
