Download or read book Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages written by Sanping Chen and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-04-17 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In contrast to the economic and cultural dominance by the south and the east coast over the past several centuries, influence in China in the early Middle Ages was centered in the north and featured a significantly multicultural society. Many events that were profoundly formative for the future of East Asian civilization occurred during this period, although much of this multiculturalism has long been obscured due to the Confucian monopoly of written records. Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages endeavors to expose a number of long-hidden non-Sinitic characteristics and manifestations of heritage, some lasting to this very day. Sanping Chen investigates several foundational aspects of Chinese culture during this period, including the legendary unicorn and the fabled heroine Mulan, to determine the origin and development of the lore. His meticulous research yields surprising results. For instance, he finds that the character Mulan is not of Chinese origin and that Central Asian influences are to be found in language, religion, governance, and other fundamental characteristics of Chinese culture. As Victor Mair writes in the Foreword, "While not everyone will acquiesce in the entirety of Dr. Chen's findings, no reputable scholar can afford to ignore them with impunity." These "foreign"-origin elements were largely the legacy of the Tuoba, whose descendants in fact dominated China's political and cultural stage for nearly a millennium. Long before the Mongols, the Tuoba set a precedent for "using the civilized to rule the civilized" by attracting a large number of sedentary Central Asians to East Asia. This not only added a strong pre-Islamic Iranian layer to the contemporary Sinitic culture but also commenced China's golden age under the cosmopolitan Tang dynasty, whose nominally "Chinese" ruling house is revealed by Chen to be the biological and cultural heir of the Tuoba.

Download or read book Early Medieval China written by Wendy Swartz and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-11 with total page 745 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative sourcebook builds a dynamic understanding of China's early medieval period (220–589) through an original selection and arrangement of literary, historical, religious, and critical texts. A tumultuous and formative era, these centuries saw the longest stretch of political fragmentation in China's imperial history, resulting in new ethnic configurations, the rise of powerful clans, and a pervasive divide between north and south. Deploying thematic categories, the editors sketch the period in a novel way for students and, by featuring many texts translated into English for the first time, recast the era for specialists. Thematic topics include regional definitions and tensions, governing mechanisms and social reality, ideas of self and other, relations with the unseen world, everyday life, and cultural concepts. Within each section, the editors and translators introduce the selected texts and provide critical commentary on their historical significance, along with suggestions for further reading and research.

Download or read book The Women Who Ruled China written by Stephanie Balkwill and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-08-06 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In the late fifth century, a girl whose name has been forgotten by history was born at the edge of the Chinese empire. By the time of her death, she had transformed herself into Empress Dowager Ling, one of the most powerful politicians of her age and one of the first of many Buddhist women to wield incredible influence in dynastic East Asia. In this book, Stephanie Balkwill documents the Empress Dowager’s rise to power and life on the throne against the broader world of imperial China under the rule of the Northern Wei dynasty, a foreign people from Inner Asia who built their capital deep in the Chinese heartland. Building on largely untapped Buddhist materials, Balkwill shows that the life and rule of the Empress Dowager is a larger story of the reinvention of religious, ethnic, and gender norms in a rapidly changing multicultural society. The Women Who Ruled China recovers the voices of those left out of the mainstream historical record, painting a compelling portrait of medieval Chinese society reinventing itself under the Empress Dowager’s leadership.

Download or read book Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China written by E. N. Anderson and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2014-11-04 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese food is one of the most recognizable and widely consumed cuisines in the world. Almost no town on earth is without a Chinese restaurant of some kind, and Chinese canned, frozen, and preserved foods are available in shops from Nairobi to Quito. But the particulars of Chinese cuisine vary widely from place to place as its major ingredients and techniques have been adapted to local agriculture and taste profiles. To trace the roots of Chinese foodways, one must look back to traditional food systems before the early days of globalization. Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China traces the development of the food systems that coincided with China's emergence as an empire. Before extensive trade and cultural exchange with Europe was established, Chinese farmers and agriculturalists developed systems that used resources in sustainable and efficient ways, permitting intensive and productive techniques to survive over millennia. Fields, gardens, semiwild lands, managed forests, and specialized agricultural landscapes all became part of an integrated network that produced maximum nutrients with minimal input—though not without some environmental cost. E. N. Anderson examines premodern China's vast, active network of trade and contact, such as the routes from Central Asia to Eurasia and the slow introduction of Western foods and medicines under the Mongol Empire. Bringing together a number of new findings from archaeology, history, and field studies of environmental management, Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China provides an updated picture of language relationships, cultural innovations, and intercultural exchanges.

Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Medieval China written by Victor Cunrui Xiong and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-04-06 with total page 1007 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The crucial period of Chinese history, 168-979, falls naturally into contrasting phases. The first phase, also known as that of 'early medieval China,' is an age of political decentralization. Following the breakup of the Han empire, China was plunged into civil war and fragmentation and stayed divided for nearly four centuries. The second phase started in 589, during the Sui dynasty, when China was once again brought under a single government. Under the Sui, the bureaucracy was revitalized, the military strengthened, and the taxation system reformed. The fall of the Sui in 618 gave way to the even stronger Tang dynasty, which represents an apogee of traditional Chinese civilization. Inheriting all the great institutions developed under the Sui, the Tang made great achievements in poetry, painting, music, and architecture. The An Lushan rebellion, which also took place during Tang rule, brought about far-reaching changes in the socioeconomic, political, and military arenas. What transpired in the second half of the Tang and the ensuing Five Dynasties provided the foundation for the next age of late imperial China. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Medieval China contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1000 cross-referenced entries on historical figure. It expands on existing thematic entries, and adds a number of new ones with substantial content, including those on nobility, art, architecture, archaeology, economy, agriculture, money, population, cities, literature, historiography, military, religion, Persia, India, Japan, Korea, Arabs, and Byzantium, among others. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about medieval China.

Download or read book Patronage and Community in Medieval China written by Andrew Chittick and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2010-07-02 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first book-length treatment of a provincial military society in China's early medieval period offers a vivid portrait of this milieu and invites readers to reevaluate their understanding of a critical period in Chinese history. Drawing on poetry, local history, archaeology, and Buddhist materials, as well as more traditional historical sources, Andrew Chittick explores the culture and interrelationships of the leading figures of the Xiangyang region (in the north of modern Hubei province) in the centuries leading up to the Sui unification. Using the model of patron-client relations to characterize the interactions between local men and representatives of the southern court at Jiankang, the book emphasizes the way in which these interactions were shaped by personal ties and cultural and status differences. The result is a compelling explanation for the shifting, unstable, and violent nature of the political and military system of the southern dynasties. Offering a wider perspective which considers the social world beyond the capital elite, the book challenges earlier conceptions of medieval society as "aristocratic" and rooted in family lineage and officeholding. Andrew Chittick is E. Leslie Peter Associate Professor of East Asian Humanities at Eckerd College.

Download or read book Lutes and Marginality in Pre Modern China written by Ingrid Maren Furniss and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-07-23 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lutes and Marginality in Pre-Modern China traces the complex history of lutes as they moved from the far west into China, and how these instruments became linked to various forms of social, cultural, ethnic, and religious marginality within and at China’s borders. The book argues that the lute, a musical instrument that likely originated in the Near East or Central Asia, became a highly charged object replete with associations of ethnic and political identity, social status, and gender in China across the third to seventeenth centuries, and as such, offers a crucial vehicle for understanding interactions between the Chinese center and periphery. Using a richly interdisciplinary perspective that brings together music history, performance studies, archaeology, and art history, the author draws together the visual evidence for the history of Chinese lutes and analyzes the political and cultural dimensions of their depictions in art. In exploring the lute’s reception across time and space, this book illuminates the shifting relationships between China and cultures along its frontier, as well as the dynamics of gender and social status within China’s center. Comprehensive in scope, Lutes and Marginality in Pre-Modern China offers new insights for scholars of pre-modern China, art history, archaeology, music history, ethnomusicology, and Silk Road and frontier studies.

Download or read book Coming Out of the Middle Ages written by Weizheng Zhu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-25 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume examine China's medievalism from the viewpoint of cultural history, philosophy and comparative literature. Contributors discuss the lingering effects of the Middle Ages on Chinese thought and industry, and assess how these attitudes affect China's relations with the West.

Download or read book The Jiankang Empire in Chinese and World History written by Andrew Chittick and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work offers a sweeping re-assessment of the Jiankang Empire (3rd-6th centuries CE), known as the Chinese "Southern Dynasties." It shows how, although one of the medieval world's largest empires, Jiankang has been rendered politically invisible by the standard narrative of Chinese nationalist history, and proposes a new framework and terminology for writing about medieval East Asia. The book pays particular attention to the problem of ethnic identification, rejecting the idea of "ethnic Chinese," and delineating several other, more useful ethnographic categories, using case studies in agriculture/foodways and vernacular languages. The most important, the Wuren of the lower Yangzi region, were believed to be inherently different from the peoples of the Central Plains, and the rest of the book addresses the extent of their ethnogenesis in the medieval era. It assesses the political culture of the Jiankang Empire, emphasizing military strategy, institutional cultures, and political economy, showing how it differed from Central Plains-based empires, while having significant similarities to Southeast Asian regimes. It then explores how the Jiankang monarchs deployed three distinct repertoires of political legitimation (vernacular, Sinitic universalist, and Buddhist), arguing that the Sinitic repertoire was largely eclipsed in the sixth century, rendering the regime yet more similar to neighboring South Seas states. The conclusion points out how the research re-orients our understanding of acculturation and ethnic identification in medieval East Asia, generates new insights into the Tang-Song transition period, and offers new avenues of comparison with Southeast Asian and medieval European history.

Download or read book Translating Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China written by C. Pierce Salguero and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2014-06-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transmission of Buddhism from India to China was one of the most significant cross-cultural exchanges in the premodern world. This cultural encounter involved more than the spread of religious and philosophical knowledge. It influenced many spheres of Chinese life, including the often overlooked field of medicine. Analyzing a wide variety of Chinese Buddhist texts, C. Pierce Salguero examines the reception of Indian medical ideas in medieval China. These texts include translations from Indian languages as well as Chinese compositions completed in the first millennium C.E. Translating Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China illuminates and analyzes the ways Chinese Buddhist writers understood and adapted Indian medical knowledge and healing practices and explained them to local audiences. The book moves beyond considerations of accuracy in translation by exploring the resonances and social logics of intercultural communication in their historical context. Presenting the Chinese reception of Indian medicine as a process of negotiation and adaptation, this innovative and interdisciplinary work provides a dynamic exploration of the medical world of medieval Chinese society. At the center of Salguero's work is an appreciation of the creativity of individual writers as they made sense of disease, health, and the body in the context of regional and transnational traditions. By integrating religious studies, translation studies, and literature with the history of medicine, Translating Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China reconstructs the crucial role of translated Buddhist knowledge in the vibrant medical world of medieval China.

Download or read book The Imperial Network in Ancient China written by Maxim Korolkov and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-18 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the emergence of imperial state in East Asia during the period ca. 400 BCE–200 CE as a network-based process, showing how the geography of early interregional contacts south of the Yangzi River informed the directions of Sinitic state expansion. Drawing from an extensive collection of sources including transmitted textual records, archaeological evidence, excavated legal manuscripts, and archival documents from Liye, this book demonstrates the breadth of human and material resources available to the empire builders of an early imperial network throughout southern East Asia – from institutions and infrastructures, to the relationships that facilitated circulation. This network is shown to have been essential to the consolidation of Sinitic imperial rule in the sub-tropical zone south of the Yangzi against formidable environmental, epidemiological, and logistical odds. This is also the first study to explore how the interplay between an imperial network and alternative frameworks of long-distance interaction in ancient East Asia shaped the political-economic trajectory of the Sinitic world and its involvement in Eurasian globalization. Contributing to debates around imperial state formation, the applicability of world-system models and the comparative study of empires, The Imperial Network in Ancient China will be of significant interest to students and scholars of East Asian studies, archaeology and history.

Download or read book Early Modern China and Northeast Asia written by Evelyn S. Rawski and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-11 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evelyn Rawski presents a revisionist history of early modern China in the context of northeast Asian geopolitics and global maritime trade.

Download or read book A History of East Asia written by Charles Holcombe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-11 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second edition of Charles Holcombe's acclaimed introduction to East Asian history from the dawn of history to the twenty-first century.

Download or read book China s New Imperialism written by Yu-Ping Chang and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-02-14 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the nature of China’s current international reassertion of itself and the thinking and attitudes which lie behind it. It argues that the Chinese leadership has a strongly held view of its own high moral authority, which emphasizes inclusion, equality and mutual benefits, and that this sense of morality underpins the driving forces for China’s foreign policies, rationalization of China’s overseas activities, the overall Chinese worldview, and China’s vision of a Chinese world order. It highlights how the country’s outward expansion has been characterized mainly by spreading influence through non-use of force and strategies of “co-operation” and “managed conflict” under the umbrella of “winning without fighting”. A set of Chinese geo-strategic reasoning that addresses how the possession of capabilities in land power and sea power will interact to produce favorable balance of power corresponds to the country’s pattern of overseas activities. The book approaches the subject empirically based on original research into both writings for policy-making purposes, which indicate realistic assessments of world politics and of China’s international capacity, and also narratives for public consumption, which have less emphasis on selfinterest and realpolitik. The book concludes that Beijing’s self-privileging high morality might have the unfortunate consequence of reinforcing its own behavior which defies international order and which others disapprove of, thereby increasing the likelihood of non-armed and armed conflicts.

Download or read book Kingship in Early Medieval China written by Andrew Eisenberg and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-02-28 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The institution of the Retired Emperor forms the innovative angle from which this study analyzes Classical Chinese political history (4th to 7th centuries A.D.) With the help of the ensuing insights the volume develops into a portal through which to gain understanding of broader patterns of political and social action relevant to the Classical Chinese monarchy. In this truly interdisciplinary approach Weberian historical sociological concepts are engaged as a means of bringing specific historical actions into a wider cross cultural comparative perspective and lays the basis for a new framework to think about kingship and succession in East Asia.

Download or read book Ethnic Groups of North East and Central Asia written by James B. Minahan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-02-10 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering countries ranging from Afghanistan and China to Kazakhstan and Russia, this encyclopedia supplies detailed information and informed perspectives, enabling readers to comprehend Asian ethnic groups as well as Asian politics and history. Asia is quickly becoming one of the most important regions of the world—culturally, economically, and politically. This work provides encyclopedic coverage of a wide array of Central, North, and East Asian ethnic groups, including those in eastern Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, China, Taiwan, Japan, and the Koreas. Arranged alphabetically by ethnic group, each entry provides an overview of the group that identifies its major population centers and population, primary languages and religions, parallels with other groups, origins and early development, major historic events, and cultural belief systems. Information on each group's typical ways of life, relations with neighboring groups, politics and recent history, notable challenges, demographic trends, and key figures is also included. Special attention is focused on the numerous ethnic groups that make up China, one of the world's most populated countries. Sidebars throughout the text provide fascinating facts and information about specific groups to make the encyclopedia more accessible and appealing, while "Further Reading" sections at the end of each entry and the bibliography will provide ample additional resources for students performing in-depth research.

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 248 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.