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 China s Last Empire written by William T. Rowe and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a brisk revisionist history, William Rowe challenges the standard narrative of Qing China as a decadent, inward-looking state that failed to keep pace with the modern West. This original, thought-provoking history of China's last empire is a must-read for understanding the challenges facing China today.

Download or read book Making China Modern written by Klaus Mühlhahn and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2019-01-14 with total page 737 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Klaus Mühlhahn situates modern China in the nation's long, dynamic tradition of overcoming adversity and weakness through creative adaptation--a legacy of crisis and recovery that is apparent today in China's triumphs but also in its most worrisome trends. Mühlhahn's panoramic survey rewrites the history of modern China for a new generation.

Download or read book Eunuch and Emperor in the Great Age of Qing Rule written by Norman A. Kutcher and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2018-07-31 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eunuch and Emperor in the Great Age of Qing Rule offers a new interpretation of eunuchs and their connection to imperial rule in the first century and a half of the Qing dynasty (1644–1800). This period encompassed the reigns of three of China’s most important emperors, men who were deeply affected by the great eunuch corruption of the fallen Ming dynasty. In this groundbreaking and deeply researched book, the author explores how Qing emperors sought to prevent a return of the harmful excesses of eunuchs and how eunuchs flourished in the face of the restrictions imposed upon them. We meet powerful eunuchs who faithfully served, and in some cases ultimately betrayed, their emperors. We also meet ordinary eunuchs whose lives, punctuated by dramas large and small, provide a fascinating perspective on the Qing palace world.

Download or read book The Great Ming Code Da Ming lu written by and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imperial China’s dynastic legal codes provide a wealth of information for historians, social scientists, and scholars of comparative law and of literary, cultural, and legal history. Until now, only the Tang (618–907 C.E.) and Qing (1644–1911 C.E.) codes have been available in English translation. The present book is the first English translation of The Great Ming Code (Da Ming lu), which reached its final form in 1397. The translation is preceded by an introductory essay that places the Code in historical context, explores its codification process, and examines its structure and contents. A glossary of Chinese terms is also provided. One of the most important law codes in Chinese history, The Great Ming Code represents a break with the past, following the alien-ruled Yuan (Mongol) dynasty, and the flourishing of culture under the Ming, the last great Han-ruled dynasty. It was also a model for the Qing code, which followed it, and is a fundamental source for understanding Chinese society and culture. The Code regulated all the perceived major aspects of social affairs, aiming at the harmony of political, economic, military, familial, ritual, international, and legal relations in the empire and cosmic relations in the universe. The all-encompassing nature of the Code makes it an encyclopedic document, providing rich materials on Ming history. Because of the pervasiveness of legal proceedings in the culture generally, the Code has relevance far beyond the specialized realm of Chinese legal studies. The basic value system and social norms that the Code imposed became so thoroughly ingrained in Chinese society that the Manchus, who conquered China and established the Qing dynasty, chose to continue the Code in force with only minor changes. The Code made a considerable impact on the legal cultures of other East Asian countries: Yi dynasty Korea, Le dynasty Vietnam, and late Tokugawa and early Meiji Japan. Examining why and how some rules in the Code were adopted and others rejected in these countries will certainly enhance our understanding of the shared culture and indigenous identities in East Asia.

Download or read book Surviving the Dragon written by Arjia Rinpoche and published by Rodale Books. This book was released on 2010-03-02 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a peaceful summer day in 1952, ten monks on horseback arrived at a traditional nomad tent in northeastern Tibet where they offered the parents of a precocious toddler their white handloomed scarves and congratulations for having given birth to a holy child—and future spiritual leader. Surviving the Dragon is the remarkable life story of Arjia Rinpoche, who was ordained as a reincarnate lama at the age of two and fled Tibet 46 years later. In his gripping memoir, Rinpoche relates the story of having been abandoned in his monastery as a young boy after witnessing the torture and arrest of his monastery family. In the years to come, Rinpoche survived under harsh Chinese rule, as he was forced into hard labor and endured continual public humiliation as part of Mao's Communist "reeducation." By turns moving, suspenseful, historical, and spiritual, Rinpoche's unique experiences provide a rare window into a tumultuous period of Chinese history and offer readers an uncommon glimpse inside a Buddhist monastery in Tibet.

Download or read book China A History written by Harold Miles Tanner and published by Hackett Publishing. This book was released on 2009-03-13 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deep and rigorous, yet eminently accessible introduction to the political, social, and cultural development of imperial Chinese civilisation, this volume develops a number of important themes -- such as the ethnic diversity of the early empires -- that other editions omit entirely or discuss only minimally. Includes a general introduction, chronology, bibliography, illustrations, maps, and an index.

Download or read book Great State written by Timothy Brook and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2019-09-19 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China is one of the oldest states in the world. It achieved its approximate current borders with the Ascendancy of the Yuan dynasty in the 13th century, and despite the passing of one Imperial dynasty to the next, it has maintained them for the eight centuries since. Even the European colonial powers at the height of their power could not move past coastal enclaves. Thus, China remained China through the Ming, the Qing, the Republic, the Occupation, and Communism. But, despite the desires of some of the most powerful people in the Great State through the ages, China has never been alone in the world. It has had to contend with invaders from the steppe and the challenges posed by foreign traders and imperialists. Indeed, its rulers for the majority of the last eight centuries have not been Chinese. Timothy Brook examines China's relationship with the world from the Yuan through to the present by following the stories of ordinary and extraordinary people navigating the spaces where China met and meets the world. Bureaucrats, horse traders, spiritual leaders, explorers, pirates, emperors, invaders, migrant workers, traitors, and visionaries: this is a history of China as no one has told it before.

Download or read book Forging the Golden Urn written by Max Oidtmann and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-31 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1995, the People’s Republic of China resurrected a Qing-era law mandating that the reincarnations of prominent Tibetan Buddhist monks be identified by drawing lots from a golden urn. The Chinese Communist Party hoped to limit the ability of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile to independently identify reincarnations. In so doing, they elevated a long-forgotten ceremony into a controversial symbol of Chinese sovereignty in Tibet. In Forging the Golden Urn, Max Oidtmann ventures into the polyglot world of the Qing empire in search of the origins of the golden urn tradition. He seeks to understand the relationship between the Qing state and its most powerful partner in Inner Asia—the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism. Why did the Qianlong emperor invent the golden urn lottery in 1792? What ability did the Qing state have to alter Tibetan religious and political traditions? What did this law mean to Qing rulers, their advisors, and Tibetan Buddhists? Working with both the Manchu-language archives of the empire’s colonial bureaucracy and the chronicles of Tibetan elites, Oidtmann traces how a Chinese bureaucratic technology—a lottery for assigning administrative posts—was exported to the Tibetan and Mongolian regions of the Qing empire and transformed into a ritual for identifying and authenticating reincarnations. Forging the Golden Urn sheds new light on how the empire’s frontier officers grappled with matters of sovereignty, faith, and law and reveals the role that Tibetan elites played in the production of new religious traditions in the context of Qing rule.

Download or read book The Qing Dynasty written by Captivating History and published by . This book was released on 2019-12-24 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Succeeding the Ming dynasty in 1644, the Qing emperors managed to create one of the largest empires ever to exist in the territories of Asia and the fifth largest empire in the world.

Download or read book Commerce in Culture written by Cynthia J. Brokaw and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 699 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sibao today is a cluster of impoverished villages in the mountains of western Fujian. Yet from the late seventeenth through the early twentieth century, it was home to a flourishing publishing industry. Through itinerant booksellers and branch bookshops managed by Sibao natives, this industry supplied much of south China with cheap educational texts, household guides, medical handbooks, and fortune-telling manuals.It is precisely the ordinariness of Sibao imprints that make them valuable for the study of commercial publishing, the text-production process, and the geographical and social expansion of book culture in Chinese society. In a study with important implications for cultural and economic history, Cynthia Brokaw describes rural, lower-level publishing and bookselling operations at the end of the imperial period. Commerce in Culture traces how the poverty and isolation of Sibao necessitated a bare-bones approach to publishing and bookselling and how the Hakka identity of the Sibao publishers shaped the configuration of their distribution networks and even the nature of their publications.Sibao’s industry reveals two major trends in print culture: the geographical extension of commercial woodblock publishing to hinterlands previously untouched by commercial book culture and the related social penetration of texts to lower-status levels of the population."

Download or read book China Marches West written by Peter C Perdue and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 748 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From about 1600 to 1800, the Qing empire of China expanded to unprecedented size. Through astute diplomacy, economic investment, and a series of ambitious military campaigns into the heart of Central Eurasia, the Manchu rulers defeated the Zunghar Mongols, and brought all of modern Xinjiang and Mongolia under their control, while gaining dominant influence in Tibet. The China we know is a product of these vast conquests. Peter C. Perdue chronicles this little-known story of China's expansion into the northwestern frontier. Unlike previous Chinese dynasties, the Qing achieved lasting domination over the eastern half of the Eurasian continent. Rulers used forcible repression when faced with resistance, but also aimed to win over subject peoples by peaceful means. They invested heavily in the economic and administrative development of the frontier, promoted trade networks, and adapted ceremonies to the distinct regional cultures. Perdue thus illuminates how China came to rule Central Eurasia and how it justifies that control, what holds the Chinese nation together, and how its relations with the Islamic world and Mongolia developed. He offers valuable comparisons to other colonial empires and discusses the legacy left by China's frontier expansion. The Beijing government today faces unrest on its frontiers from peoples who reject its autocratic rule. At the same time, China has launched an ambitious development program in its interior that in many ways echoes the old Qing policies. China Marches West is a tour de force that will fundamentally alter the way we understand Central Eurasia.

Download or read book The Qing Dynasty and Traditional Chinese Culture written by Richard J. Smith and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-10-23 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Qing dynasty (1636–1912)—a crucial bridge between “traditional” and “modern” China—was remarkable for its expansiveness and cultural sophistication. This engaging and insightful history of Qing political, social, and cultural life traces the complex interaction between the Inner Asian traditions of the Manchus, who conquered China in 1644, and indigenous Chinese cultural traditions. Noted historian Richard J. Smith argues that the pragmatic Qing emperors presented a “Chinese” face to their subjects who lived south of the Great Wall and other ethnic faces (particularly Manchu, Mongolian, Central Asian, and Tibetan) to subjects in other parts of their vast multicultural empire. They were attracted by many aspects of Chinese culture, but far from being completely “sinicized” as many scholars argue, they were also proud of their own cultural traditions and interested in other cultures as well. Setting Qing dynasty culture in historical and global perspective, Smith shows how the Chinese of the era viewed the world; how their outlook was expressed in their institutions, material culture, and customs; and how China’s preoccupation with order, unity, and harmony contributed to the civilization’s remarkable cohesiveness and continuity. Nuanced and wide-ranging, his authoritative book provides an essential introduction to late imperial Chinese culture and society.

Download or read book Great Qing written by Claudia Brown and published by China Program Books (Hardcover. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addressing the previous lack of a comprehensive English-language study of Qing painting, art historian Claudia Brown?s account ranges from the tumultuous Ming?Qing transition to the end of imperial rule. In response to omissions in previous treatments, she examines major influences shaping the period and explores the relationship between painting and mapmaking, the role of patrons and collectors, printmaking and publishing, religious themes, and Western influences. With more than two hundred color illustrations, Great Qing highlights fine examples of Qing painting in American museums, works from all regions of China, and paintings by women. Brown?s gorgeous, attentively rendered survey covers three centuries of momentous change and is intended for general audiences as well as art collectors, museum curators, and students and historians of Chinese art, culture, and society.

Download or read book The Wobbling Pivot China since 1800 written by Pamela Kyle Crossley and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2010-01-28 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive but concise narrative of China since the eighteenth century builds its story around the delicate relationship between central government and local communities. Rejects the traditional view of China as a wholly harmonious society based on principles of stability – the Unwobbling Pivot of Ezra Pound's translation of the Chinese classic Zhongyong Provides an original interpretation, arguing that developments can be explained through an understanding of China’s surprising swings between centralization and decentralization, between local initiative and central authoritarianism Serves as an introduction to the subject, while readers with a background in Chinese history will find the book offers a personal perspective and addresses long-standing interpretive issues Supported by a variety of timelines, maps, illustrations, and extensive notes for further reading Places China’s history within the context of global change

Download or read book Remaking the Chinese Empire written by Yuanchong Wang and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-15 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Remaking the Chinese Empire examines China's development from an empire into a modern state through the lens of Sino-Korean political relations during the Qing period. Incorporating Korea into the historical narrative of the Chinese empire, it demonstrates that the Manchu regime used its relations with Chosŏn Korea to establish, legitimize, and consolidate its identity as the civilized center of the world, as a cosmopolitan empire, and as a modern sovereign state. For the Manchu regime and for the Chosŏn Dynasty, the relationship was one of mutual dependence, central to building and maintaining political legitimacy. Yuanchong Wang illuminates how this relationship served as the very model for China's foreign relations. Ultimately, this precipitated contests, conflicts, and compromises among empires and states in East Asia, Inner Asia, and Southeast Asia – in particular, in the nineteenth century when international law reached the Chinese world. By adopting a long-term and cross-border perspective on high politics at the empire's core and periphery, Wang revises our understanding of the rise and transformation of the last imperial dynasty of China. His work reveals new insights on the clashes between China's foreign relations system and its Western counterpart, imperialism and colonialism in the Chinese world, and the formation of modern sovereign states in East Asia. Most significantly, Remaking the Chinese Empire breaks free of the established, national history-oriented paradigm, establishing a new paradigm through which to observe and analyze the Korean impact on the Qing Dynasty.

Download or read book Tombstone written by Yang Jisheng and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of the famine that killed roughly thirty-six million Chinese during the Great Leap Forward examines how the communist ideologies and collectivization campaigns perpetuated by the country's leaders caused the catastrophe.