Download or read book New Perspectives on Chu Culture During the Eastern Zhou Period written by Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (Smithsonian Institution) and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps no aspect of early Chinese history and culture has prompted more controversy than that associated with the ancient State of Chu. This major new volume of essays offers the most comprehensive and current analysis of Chu culture during the Eastern Zhou period (770-221 B.C.) in a Western language. Li Xueqin of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, writes on Chu bronzes and Chu culture; Lothar von Falkenhausen of Stanford University analyzes the implications of Chu ritual music; Alain Thote, of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, concentrates on the double coffin of Leigudun Tomb No. l; and Colin Mackenzie of Durham University writes on Chu bronze work.
Download or read book Chinese Annals in the Western Observatory written by Edward Shaughnessy and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-11-18 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the beginning of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of documents of all sorts have been unearthed in China, opening whole new fields of study and transforming our modern understanding of ancient China. While these discoveries have necessarily taken place in China, Western scholars have also contributed to the study of these documents throughout this entire period. This book provides a comprehensive survey of the contributions of these Western scholars to the field of Chinese paleography, and especially to study of oracle-bone inscriptions, bronze and stone inscriptions, and manuscripts written on bamboo and silk. Each of these topics is provided with a comprehensive narrative history of studies by Western scholars, as well as an exhaustive bibliography and biographies of important scholars in the field. It is also supplied with a list of Chinese translations of these studies, as well as a complete index of authors and their works. Whether the reader is interested in the history of ancient China, ancient Chinese paleographic documents, or just in the history of the study of China as it has developed in the West, this book provides one of the most complete accounts available to date.
Download or read book Excavating the Afterlife written by Guolong Lai and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2015-05-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Excavating the Afterlife, Guolong Lai explores the dialectical relationship between sociopolitical change and mortuary religion from an archaeological perspective. By examining burial structure, grave goods, and religious documents unearthed from groups of well-preserved tombs in southern China, Lai shows that new attitudes toward the dead, resulting from the trauma of violent political struggle and warfare, permanently altered the early Chinese conceptions of this world and the afterlife. The book grounds the important changes in religious beliefs and ritual practices firmly in the sociopolitical transition from the Warring States (ca. 453�221 BCE) to the early empires (3rd century�1st century BCE). A methodologically sophisticated synthesis of archaeological, art historical, and textual sources, Excavating the Afterlife will be of interest to art historians, archaeologists, and textual scholars of China, as well as to students of comparative religions. For more information: http://arthistorypi.org/books/excavating-the-afterlife
Download or read book Art of the Yellow Springs written by Wu Hung and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2015-02-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We might think the Egyptians were the masters of building tombs, but no other civilization has devoted more time and resources to underground burial structures than the Chinese. For at least five thousand years, from the fourth millennium B.C.E. to the early twentieth century, the Chinese have been building some of the world’s most elaborate tombs and furnishing them with exquisite objects. It is these objects and the concept of the tomb as a “treasure-trove” that The Art of the Yellow Springs seeks to critique, drawing on recent scholarship to examine memorial sites the way they were meant to be experienced: not as a mere store of individual works, but as a work of art itself. Wu Hung bolsters some of the new trends in Chinese art history that have been challenging the conventional ways of studying funerary art. Examining the interpretative methods themselves that guide the study of memorials, he argues that in order to understand Chinese tombs, one must not necessarily forget the individual works present in them—as the beautiful color plates here will prove—but consider them along with a host of other art-historical concepts. These include notions of visuality, viewership, space, analysis, function, and context. The result is a ground-breaking new assessment that demonstrates the amazing richness of one of the longest-running traditions in the whole of art history.
Download or read book Zhuangzi and Early Chinese Philosophy written by Steve Coutinho and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi (also known as Chuang Tzu), along with Confucius, Lao Tzu, and the Buddha, ranks among the most influential thinkers in the development of East Asian thought. His literary style is humorous and entertaining, yet the philosophical content is extraordinarily subtle and profound. This book introduces key topics in early Daoist philosophy. Drawing on several issues and methods in Western philosophy, from analytical philosophy to semiotics and hermeneutics, the author throws new light on the ancient Zhuangzi text. Engaging Daoism and contemporary Western philosophical logic, and drawing on new developments in our understanding of early Chinese culture, Coutinho challenges the interpretation of Zhuangzi as either a skeptic or a relativist, and instead seeks to explore his philosophy as emphasizing the ineradicable vagueness of language, thought and reality. This new interpretation of the Zhuangzi offers an important development in the understanding of Daoist philosophy, describing a world in flux in which things themselves are vague and inconsistent, and tries to show us a Way (a Dao) to negotiate through the shadows of a "chaotic" world.
Download or read book Archaeology of East Asia written by Gina L. Barnes and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2015-10-31 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archaeology of East Asia constitutes an introduction to social and political development from the Palaeolithic to 8th-century early historic times. It takes a regional view across China, Korea, Japan and their peripheries that is unbounded by modern state lines. This viewpoint emphasizes how the region drew on indigenous developments and exterior stimuli to produce agricultural technologies, craft production, political systems, religious outlooks and philosophies that characterize the civilization of historic and even modern East Asia. This book is a complete rewrite and update of The Rise of Civilization in East Asia, first published in 1993. It incorporates the many theoretical, technical and factual advances of the last two decades, including DNA, gender, and isotope studies, AMS radiocarbon dating and extensive excavation results. Readers of that first edition will find the same structure and topic progression. While many line drawings have been retained, new color illustrations abound. Boxes and Appendices clarify and add to the understanding of unfamiliar technologies. For those seeking more detail, the Appendices also provide case studies that take intimate looks at particular data and current research. The book is suitable for general readers, East Asian historians and students, archaeology students and professionals. Praise for The Rise of Civilization in East Asia: “… the best English introduction to the archaeology of East Asia … brilliantly integrates the three areas into a broad regional context.” Prof. Mark Hudson
Download or read book East Asian Cultural and Historical Perspectives written by University of Alberta. Research Institute for Comparative Literature and Cross-Cultural Studies and published by Research Institute for Comparative Literature. This book was released on 1997 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 The Chu Silk Manuscripts from Zidanku Changsha Hunan Province written by Li Ling and published by The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. This book was released on 2020-03-15 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Silk Manuscripts from Zidanku, Changsha (Hunan), are the only preImperial Chinese manuscripts on silk found todate. Dating to the turn from the 4th to the 3rd centuries BC (Late Warring States period), they contain several short texts concerning basic cosmological concepts, arranged in a diagrammatic arrangement and surrounded by pictorial illustrations. As such, they constitute a unique source of information complementing and going beyond what is known from transmitted texts. This is the first in a twovolume monograph on the Zidanku manuscripts, reflecting almost four decades of research by Professor Li Ling of Peking University. While the philological study and translation of the manuscript texts is the subject of Volume Two, this first volume presents the archaeological context and history of transmission of the physical manuscripts. It records how they were taken from their original place of interment in the 1940s and taken to the United States in 1946; documents the early stages in the research on the finds from the Zidanku tomb and its reexcavation in the 1970s; and accounts for where the manuscripts were kept before becoming the property, respectively, of the Arthur M. Sackler Foundation, New York (Manuscript 1), and the Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Institution (Manuscripts 2 and 3). Superseding previous efforts, this is the definitive account that will sets the record straight and establishes a new basis for future research on these uniquely important artifacts.
Download or read book Ancient Central China written by Rowan K. Flad and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-21 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient Central China provides an up-to-date synthesis of archaeological discoveries in the upper and middle Yangzi River region of China, including the Three Gorges Dam reservoir zone. It focuses on the Late Neolithic (late third millennium BC) through the end of the Bronze Age (late first millennium BC) and considers regional and interregional cultural relationships in light of anthropological models of landscape. Rowan K. Flad and Pochan Chen show that centers and peripheries of political, economic and ritual activities were not coincident, and that politically peripheral regions such as the Three Gorges were crucial hubs in interregional economic networks, particularly related to prehistoric salt production. The book provides detailed discussions of recent archaeological discoveries and data from the Chengdu Plain, Three Gorges and Hubei to illustrate how these various components of regional landscape were configured across Central China.
Download or read book Han Material Culture written by Sophia-Karin Psarras and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-02 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes Han dynasty Chinese archaeology based on a comparison of the forms of vessels found in positively dated tombs.
Download or read book Possessing the Past written by 國立故宮博物院 and published by Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book was released on 1996 with total page 666 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major scholarly work, published in conjunction with the exhibition titled "Splendors of Imperial China: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei" (on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art during 1996, and scheduled for several other American cities during 1996-1997). Written by scholars of both Chinese and Western cultural backgrounds and conceived as a cultural history, the book synthesizes scholarship of the past three decades to present the historical and cultural significance of individual works of art and analyses of their aesthetic content, as well as reevaluation of the cultural dynamics of Chinese history. Includes some 600 illustrations, 436 in color. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Nomadic Art of the Eastern Eurasian Steppes written by Emma C. Bunker and published by Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book was released on 2002 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating book examines the artistic exchange between the nomadic peoples of what is now Inner Mongolia and their settled Chinese neighbors during the first millennium B.C.
Download or read book Phoenix Kingdoms written by Lai Guolong and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Featuring about 150 loans from China's Hubei Provincial Museum, this exhibition, set to open at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco under the name Lost Kingdoms of Ancient China, examines the new finds of Zeng and Chu tombs together to explore the cultural landscape of the southern borderland of the Zhou dynasty. It also reveals the legendary rising story of the phoenix kingdom erased by the Qin, highlighting the importance of the middle Yangtze River region in forming a southern style in Chinese art. For a better understanding of the Zeng and Chu material, the exhibition catalogue consists of seven essays to elaborate the introduction to the remarkable art and culture of this region, with entries of about 150 works in six categories (jade, bronze ritual vessels, musical instruments and weapons, lacquerware for luxury and ceremony, funerary bronze and wood objects, and textiles and artefacts with designs). Seven contributors have written for this catalogue, including five outside scholars with expertise on different subjects"--
Download or read book Religion and Chinese Society Vol 1 written by John Lagerwey and published by The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. This book was released on 2021-09-24 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirty years ago, Hu Shih's views of Chinese society and history were representative of Sinology in general: China itself had no native religion, just local customs; its only real religion was an import, Buddhism. These views have now been completely overturned, with massive implications for our understanding not only of China but also of humanity as a whole: it is no longer possible to imagine that at least one major traditional society constructed and construed itself without reference to a non-mundane world that permeated every facet of society, and it therefore becomes indispensable for students of China to take the history of Chinese religion into account and for students of religion to take into account the Chinese experience of and Chinese categories for dealing with religious phenomena. The present volumes contain a selection of twenty-one essays presented in a conference convened jointly by the Ecole francaise d'Extreme-Orient and the Centre for the Study of Religion and Chinese Society of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, on "Religion and Chinese Society: The Transformation of a Field and Its Implications for the Study of Chinese Culture" held on May 29-June 2, 2000. The collection aims at providing as wide a coverage as possible of recent research in the history of Chinese religion and seeks to draw some tentative conclusions about the implications for the study of Chinese religion and society in general.
Download or read book Pattern and Person written by Martin J. Powers and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Classical China, crafted artifacts offered a material substrate for abstract thought as graphic paradigms for social relationships. Focusing on the fifth to second centuries B.C., Martin Powers explores how these paradigms continued to inform social thought long after the material substrate had been abandoned. In this detailed study, the author makes the claim that artifacts are never neutral: as a distinctive possession, each object—through the abstracting function of style—offers a material template for scales of value. Likewise, through style, pictorial forms can make claims about material “referents,” the things depicted. By manipulating these scales and their referents, artifacts can shape the way status, social role, or identity is understood and enforced. The result is a kind of “spatial epistemology” within which the identities of persons are constructed. Powers thereby posits a relationship between art and society that operates at a level deeper than iconography, attributes, or social institutions. Historically, Pattern and Person traces the evolution of personhood in China from a condition of hereditary status to one of achieved social role and greater personal choice. This latter development, essential for bureaucratic organization and individual achievement, challenges the conventional opposition between “Western” individuals and “collective” Asians."
Download or read book Music Cosmology and the Politics of Harmony in Early China written by Erica Fox Brindley and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the religious, political, and cultural significance attributed to music in early China. In early China, conceptions of music became important culturally and politically. This fascinating book examines a wide range of texts and discourse on music during this period (ca. 500100 BCE) in light of the rise of religious, protoscientific beliefs on the intrinsic harmony of the cosmos. By tracking how music began to take on cosmic and religious significance, Erica Fox Brindley shows how music was used as a tool for such enterprises as state unification and cultural imperialism. She also outlines how musical discourse accompanied the growth of an explicit psychology of the emotions, served as a fundamental medium for spiritual attunement with the cosmos, and was thought to have utility and potency in medicine. While discussions of music in state ritual or as an aesthetic and cultural practice abound, this book is unique in linking music to religious belief and demonstrating its convergences with key religious, political, and intellectual transformations in early China.
