Download or read book Food Money in Ancient China written by Gu Ban and published by Octagon Press, Limited. This book was released on 1974 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Food and Money in Ancient China written by Gu Ban and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Food and Money in Ancient China written by Gu Ban and published by . This book was released on 2013-10 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2013 Reprint of 1950 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. There are four ancient histories of China. The second oldest is the Han Shu, the "Book of Han," which is divided into the Former Han and Later Han dynastic histories. Chapter 24 of the Former Han Shu, dealing with food and money, comprises the bulk of this scholarly work. The value of the "Book of Han" lies in the fact that it was written shortly after the period which it describes (the Former Han Dynasty covers the period from 206 B.C. to A.D. 19). The historian had access to materials which have since been lost and, what is more, was in a position to reproduce faithfully the spirit of the era. The shortcomings are, from an economist's point of view, the lack of systematic specific in- formation on prices and on forms of economic activity. Nevertheless, Han Shu 24 makes interesting reading. The author(s) recorded the then prevalent belief that agriculture is the basis of all endeavor and that trade is a somewhat superfluous, and often wicked, enterprise. Another idea preserved for posterity is that the forces of the market have to be contained. During the Han period a number of emperors instituted complicated price-equalization programs for agricultural commodities, and one of the early Han rulers unequivocally recognized that the demand for agricultural commodities was highly inelastic. The orientation of this probably definitive translation is toward the Chinese language scholar and, in a lesser way, toward the historian. The additional commentaries, of which there are a number in the book, are slanted the same way.
Download or read book Food in Ancient China written by Yitzchak Jaffe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-31 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Element provides an overview of food and foodways in Ancient China, from the earliest humans (~500k BP) up to its historical beginnings: the foundation of the Zhou dynasty (at the start of the 1st millennium BCE). While textual data provides insights on food and diet during China's historical periods, archaeological data is the main source for studying the deep past and reconstructing what people ate, how they ate and with whom they ate it. This Element introduces the plants and animals that formed the building blocks of ancient diets and cuisines, as well as how they created localized lifeways and unifying constructs across ancient China. Foodways, how food was grown, prepared and consumed, was central in the development of differing social, economic and political realities, as it shaped ritual and burial practices, differentiated ethnic groups, solidified community ties and deepened or assuaged social inequalities.
Download or read book Daily Life in Ancient China written by Mu-chou Poo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-21 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book employs textual and archaeological material to reconstruct the various features of daily life in ancient China.
Download or read book China s Golden Age written by Charles D. Benn and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating and detailed profile, Benn paints a vivid picture of life in the Tang Dynasty (618-907), traditionally regarded as the golden age of China. 40 line illustrations.
Download or read book Of Tripod and Palate written by R. Sterckx and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2005-10-13 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Attitudes toward food and commensality constituted a central fiber in the social, religious, and political fabric of ancient Chinese society. The offering of sacrifices, the banqueting of guests, and the ritual preparation, prohibition or consumption of food and drink were central elements in each of China's three main religious traditions: the Classicist (Confucian) tradition, religious Daoism, and Buddhism. What links late Shang and Zhou bronze vessels to Buddhist dietary codes or Daoist recipes for immortality is a poignant testimony that culinary activity - fasting and feasting - governed not only human relationships but also fermented the communication between humans and the spirit world. In Of Tripod and Palate leading scholars examine the relationship between secular and religious food culture in ancient China from various perspectives.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Ancient China written by Michael Loewe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-03-13 with total page 1192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge History of Ancient China provides a survey of the institutional and cultural history of pre-imperial China.
Download or read book Women in Early Imperial China written by Bret Hinsch and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2002 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written for his dissertation at Harvard in 1993, Hinsch's (history, National Chung Cheng U., Taiwan) fascinating study of women during the Qin and Han periods in China provides a useful addition to the history of ancient women as well as life in early imperial China. The lives of women and their roles are examined in several contexts, including cosmology, kinship, law, government, learning, and ritual. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.
Download or read book Ancient China and its Enemies written by Nicola Di Cosmo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-02-25 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relations between Inner Asian nomads and Chinese are a continuous theme throughout Chinese history. By investigating the formation of nomadic cultures, by analyzing the evolution of patterns of interaction along China's frontiers, and by exploring how this interaction was recorded in historiography, this looks at the origins of the cultural and political tensions between these two civilizations through the first millennium BC. The main purpose of the book is to analyze ethnic, cultural, and political frontiers between nomads and Chinese in the historical contexts that led to their formation, and to look at cultural perceptions of 'others' as a function of the same historical process. Based on both archaeological and textual sources, this 2002 book also introduces a new methodological approach to Chinese frontier history, which combines extensive factual data with a careful scrutiny of the motives, methods, and general conception of history that informed the Chinese historian Ssu-ma Ch'ien.
Download or read book A History of China written by Wolfram Eberhard and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1966 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Daily Life in Ancient China written by Mu-chou Poo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-21 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, Mu-chou Poo offers a new overview of daily life in ancient China. Synthesizing a range of textual and archaeological materials, he brings a thematic approach to the topic that enables a multi-faceted understanding of the ideological, economical, legal, social, and emotional aspects of life in ancient China. The volume focuses on the Han period and examines key topics such as government organization and elite ideology, urban and country life, practical technology, leisure and festivity, and death and burial customs. Written in clear and engaging prose, this volume serves as a useful introduction to the culture and society of ancient China. It also enables students to better understand the construction of history and to reflect critically on the nature of historical writing.
Download or read book Fountain of Fortune written by Richard von Glahn and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-07-28 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most striking feature of Wutong, the preeminent God of Wealth in late imperial China, was the deity’s diabolical character. Wutong was perceived not as a heroic figure or paragon but rather as an embodiment of greed and lust, a maleficent demon who preyed on the weak and vulnerable. In The Sinister Way, Richard von Glahn examines the emergence and evolution of the Wutong cult within the larger framework of the historical development of Chinese popular or vernacular religion—as opposed to institutional religions such as Buddhism or Daoism. Von Glahn’s study, spanning three millennia, gives due recognition to the morally ambivalent and demonic aspects of divine power within the common Chinese religious culture. Surveying Chinese religion from 1000 BCE to the beginning of the twentieth century, The Sinister Way views the Wutong cult as by no means an aberration. In Von Glahn’s work we see how, from earliest times, the Chinese imagined an enchanted world populated by fiendish fairies and goblins, ancient stones and trees that spring suddenly to life, ghosts of the unshriven dead, and the blood-eating spirits of the mountains and forests. From earliest times, too, we find in Chinese religious culture an abiding tension between two fundamental orientations: on one hand, belief in the power of sacrifice and exorcism to win blessings and avert calamity through direct appeal to a multitude of gods; on the other, faith in an all-encompassing moral equilibrium inhering in the cosmos.
Download or read book The Rise of the Chinese Empire Nation state imperialism in early China ca 1600 B C A D 8 written by Chun-shu Chang and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second and first centuries B.C. were a critical period in Chinese history—they saw the birth and development of the new Chinese empire and its earliest expansion and acquisition of frontier territories. But for almost two thousand years, because of gaps in the available records, this essential chapter in the history was missing. Fortunately, with the discovery during the last century of about sixty thousand Han-period documents in Central Asia and western China preserved on strips of wood and bamboo, scholars have been able, for the first time, to put together many of the missing pieces. In this first volume of his monumental history, Chun-shu Chang uses these newfound documents to analyze the ways in which political, institutional, social, economic, military, religious, and thought systems developed and changed in the critical period from early China to the Han empire (ca. 1600 B.C. – A.D. 220). In addition to exploring the formation and growth of the Chinese empire and its impact on early nation-building and later territorial expansion, Chang also provides insights into the life and character of critical historical figures such as the First Emperor (221– 210 B.C.) of the Ch’in and Wu-ti (141– 87 B.C.) of the Han, who were the principal agents in redefining China and its relationships with other parts of Asia. As never before, Chang’s study enables an understanding of the origins and development of the concepts of state, nation, nationalism, imperialism, ethnicity, and Chineseness in ancient and early Imperial China, offering the first systematic reconstruction of the history of Chinese acquisition and colonization. Chun-shu Changis Professor of History at the University of Michigan and is the author, with Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang, ofCrisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-Century ChinaandRedefining History: Ghosts, Spirits, and Human Society in P’u Sung-ling’s World, 1640–1715. “An extraordinary survey of the political and administrative history of early imperial China, which makes available a body of evidence and scholarship otherwise inaccessible to English-readers. The underpinning of research is truly stupendous.” —Ray Van Dam, Professor, Department of History, University of Michigan “Powerfully argues from literary and archaeological records that empire, modeled on Han paradigms, has largely defined Chinese civilization ever since.” —Joanna Waley-Cohen, Professor, Department of History, New York University
Download or read book The History of Imperial China written by Endymion Wilkinson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive introduction in English to Sinological methods and traditional Chinese historical writing. The time span ranges from earliest times to 1911, with special emphasis on the years between the third century B.C. and the eighteenth century. The author includes introductions to major reference works and biographical information, and explanations of such matters as converting traditional dates. In addition to standard histories, the survey covers biographical writing, historical and administrative geography, works on statecraft, archival sources, and Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist writings.
Download or read book Burning Money written by C. Fred Blake and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2011-09-30 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a thousand years across the length and breadth of China and beyond, people have burned paper replicas of valuable things—most often money—for the spirits of deceased family members, ancestors, and myriads of demons and divinities. Although frequently denigrated as wasteful and vulgar and at times prohibited by governing elites, today this venerable custom is as popular as ever. Burning Money explores the cultural logic of this common practice while addressing larger anthropological questions concerning the nature of value. The heart of the work integrates Chinese and Western thought and analytics to develop a theoretical framework that the author calls a “materialist aesthetics.” This includes consideration of how the burning of paper money meshes with other customs in China and around the world. The work examines the custom in contemporary everyday life, its origins in folklore and history, as well as its role in common rituals, in the social formations of dynastic and modern times, and as a “sacrifice” in the act of consecrating the paper money before burning it. Here the author suggests a great divide between the modern means of cultural reproduction through ideology and reification, with its emphasis on nature and realism, and previous pre-capitalist means through ritual and mystification, with its emphasis on authenticity. The final chapters consider how the burning money custom has survived its encounter with the modern global system and internet technology. Innovative and original in its interpretation of a common ritual in Chinese popular religion, Burning Money will be welcomed by scholars and students of Chinese religion as well as comparative religion specialists and anthropologists interested in contemporary social theory.
Download or read book Zuo Tradition Zuozhuan written by and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2017-05-01 with total page 2243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zuo Tradition (Zuozhuan; sometimes called The Zuo Commentary) is China�s first great work of history. It consists of two interwoven texts - the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu, a terse annalistic record) and a vast web of narratives and speeches that add context and interpretation to the Annals. Completed by about 300 BCE, it is the longest and one of the most difficult texts surviving from pre-imperial times. It has been as important to the foundation and preservation of Chinese culture as the historical books of the Hebrew Bible have been to the Jewish and Christian traditions. It has shaped notions of history, justice, and the significance of human action in the Chinese tradition perhaps more so than any comparable work of Latin or Greek historiography has done to Western civilization. This translation, accompanied by the original text, an introduction, and annotations, will finally make Zuozhuan accessible to all.
