Download or read book The Classic of Mountains and Seas written by and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major source of Chinese mythology (third century BC to second century AD) contains a treasure trove of rare data and colorful fiction about the mythical figures, rituals, medicine, natural history, and ethnic peoples of the ancient world. The Classic of Mountains and Seas explores 204 mythical figures such as the gods Foremost, Fond Care, and Yellow, and goddesses Queen Mother of the West and Girl Lovely, as well as many other figures unknown outside this text. This eclectic Classic also contains crucial information on early medicine (with cures for impotence and infertility), omens to avert catastrophe, and rites of sacrifice, and familiar and unidentified plants and animals. It offers a guided tour of the known world in antiquity, moving outwards from the famous mountains of central China to the lands “beyond the seas.” Translated with an introduction and notes by Anne Birrell.
Download or read book Fantastic Creatures of the Mountains and Seas written by Anonymous and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The gorgeously illustrated contemporary edition of an ancient Chinese text—for fans of fantastic beasts everywhere Fantastic Creatures of the Mountains and Seas is a new translation for contemporary readers of a classic Chinese text that is at once the geography of an ancient world, a bestiary of mythical creatures, and a book of cultural and medicinal lore. Illustrated throughout with more than 180 two-color drawings that are so sinuous they move on the page, it is a work for lovers of fantasy and mythology, ancient knowledge, fabulous beasts, and inspired art. The beings catalogued within these pages come from the regions of the known world, from the mountains and seas, the Great Wastelands, and the Lands Within the Seas that became China. They include spirits and deities and all sorts of strange creatures—dragons and phoenixes, hybrid beasts, some with human features, some hideous or with a call like wood splitting, or that portend drought or flood or bounty; others whose flesh cures disease or fends off nightmares, or whose pelt guarantees many progeny. Drawn from The Classic of Mountains and Seas, Fantastic Creatures is the work of two members of China's millennial generation, a young scholar and writer once known as the youngest "Genius of Chinese Cultural Studies" and an inspired illustrator trained in China and the United States, who together managed to communicate with the soul of a 4,000-year-old beast and have brought forth its strange beauty. Their work has been rendered into English by the foremost translator of modern Chinese literature in the West.
Download or read book Of Mountains and Seas written by Xingjian Gao and published by Chinese University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of Mountains and Seas is a fictional play that weaves together legendary characters from the classic Chinese text, Shanhaijing. The well-known mythical characters are presented as ordinary individuals who, despite their divine powers, struggle with the misadventures and emotional consequences of life. The gods appear innocent and childish, comically mixing up traditional social roles and behavior. Gao Xingjian infuses his play with his trademark unconventionality and esthetic flair, indulging in a considerable amount of inventive and open staging that allows directors to add their own creative stamp. The spectacular, eccentric characters make this play a colorful dramatic experience.
Download or read book A Chinese Bestiary written by Richard E. Strassberg and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-03 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Chinese Bestiary presents a fascinating pageant of mythical creatures from a unique and enduring cosmography written in ancient China. The Guideways through Mountains and Seas, compiled between the fourth and first centuries b.c.e., contains descriptions of hundreds of fantastic denizens of mountains, rivers, islands, and seas, along with minerals, flora, and medicine. The text also represents a wide range of beliefs held by the ancient Chinese. Richard Strassberg brings the Guideways to life for modern readers by weaving together translations from the work itself with information from other texts and recent archaeological finds to create a lavishly illustrated guide to the imaginative world of early China. Unlike the bestiaries of the late medieval period in Europe, the Guideways was not interpreted allegorically; the strange creatures described in it were regarded as actual entities found throughout the landscape. The work was originally used as a sacred geography, as a guidebook for travelers, and as a book of omens. Today, it is regarded as the richest repository of ancient Chinese mythology and shamanistic wisdom. The Guideways may have been illustrated from the start, but the earliest surviving illustrations are woodblock engravings from a rare 1597 edition. Seventy-six of those plates are reproduced here for the first time, and they provide a fine example of the Chinese engraver's art during the late Ming dynasty. This beautiful volume, compiled by a well-known specialist in the field, provides a fascinating window on the thoughts and beliefs of an ancient people, and will delight specialists and general readers alike.
Download or read book The Legends of Mountains and Seas written by Hong Yuan and published by . This book was released on 2020-01-15 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shan Hai Jing (The Legends of Mountains and Seas), commonly titled The Classic of Mountains and Seas or Guideways Through Mountains and Seas per Richard Strassberg, was a book that was juxtaposed to the later book Shui Jing (classic or canons on 137 rivers) written by Sang Qin of the Cao-Wei dynasty (220-265 A.D.). For the absurdities and strange things in the book, such as folklore monsters, weird animals, ancient clan genealogies and strange lands (i.e., terra incognita), scholars of different dynasties felt troublesome to determine the genre in the imperial bibliography. In the Manchu Qing dynasty, Ji Xiaolan treated the book as fiction; during the Republic of China, Lu Xun treated the book as sorcery; and subsequently, Yuan Ke treated the book as mythology. Anne Birrell, author of The Classic of Mountains and Seas, pointed out that the book was taken to be of different genre in history, such as geomancy, geography and cosmology, etc., with the Westerners and Japanese going astray in different directions as well, including the claims of cosmography per M. Nazin (1839), geography per Léon de Risny (1890s), tribal peoples per Gustav Schlegel (1892), deities per Edward T. C. Werner (1923), materia medica per Bernard E. Read (1928-39), religious and medical per Ito Seiji (1969), ethnographic per Rémi Mathieu, folk medicine per John William Schiffeler (1977, 1980), gendered motif per Riccardo Francasso (1988), and bestiary per Richard Strassberg (2018), etc. Today, in the context of China's assertion of the grandiose imperial past, the book was wrongly treated by the Chinese to be about ancient geological exploration records, a theme also seen in Henriette Mertz's Pale Ink (1958). The Legends of Mountains and Seas, which would be expounded in this book to be about two different kinds of fortune-telling, sorcery and divination, should not be taken as a Han-dynasty equivalent philosophical 'jing' [canons or classic, i.e., longitude/28 lodges' asterism] learning edited by Confucius and his disciples, nor the nature of the derivative sets of interpretation and commentary books that were known as the Han dynasty 'wei' ['latitude' or "five planets' divination"] series, nor the 'chen-wei' (ch'an wei) prophecy and argot books (i.e., implicit prophecy or cryptology that Jacques Gernet called by esoteric commentaries). While the mountain part of the book could be termed 'guideways' as proposed by Yuan Ke and Richard Strassberg, the 'jing'-suffixed seas' components could not be qualified with this tag. The mountains' part was actually the ancient Shi-fa stalk divination. The Legends of Mountains and Seas was compiled by Liu Xin (53 BC - 23 AD). The book, totaling 18 chapters nowadays, apparently developed the different contents throughout the Zhou, Qin, Han and Jinn dynasties. It was deduced that Liu Xin combined the five chapters of the book on the "mountains" (Wu Zang San Jing) with the chapters on the "[over-]seas" contents to become a consolidated mountains and seas' book. The seas or overseas' components could be further separated into two groups, i.e., the "inner seas" and the "outer seas" sections that were compiled by Liu Xin and the "within-seas" and the "overseas wilderness" sections that were possibly collected by Guo Pu (A.D. 276-324), with the former two sections possibly synchronizing with the Han empire's military expansion, and the latter two sharing similar contents as Lian-shan Yi (divination on concatenated [undulating] mountain ranges), Gui-cang Yi (returning-to-earth hoarding divination), A.D. 279 Ji-zhong tomb divination texts, and the 1993 Wangjiatai excavated divination texts.
Download or read book The Mountain in the Sea written by Ray Nayler and published by MCD. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *WINNER OF 2023 LOCUS AWARD FOR BEST FIRST NOVEL * FINALIST FOR THE NEBULA AWARD, and THE LOS ANGELES TIMES RAY BRADBURY PRIZE “The Mountain in the Sea is a wildly original, gorgeously written, unputdownable gem of a novel. Ray Nayler is one of the most exciting new voices I’ve read in years.” —Blake Crouch, author of Upgrade and Dark Matter Humankind discovers intelligent life in an octopus species with its own language and culture, and sets off a high-stakes global competition to dominate the future. The transnational tech corporation DIANIMA has sealed off the remote Con Dao Archipelago, where a species of octopus has been discovered that may have developed its own language and culture. The marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen, who has spent her life researching cephalopod intelligence, will do anything for the chance to study them. She travels to the islands to join DIANIMA’s team: a battle-scarred securityagent and the world’s first (and possibly last) android. The octopuses hold the key to unprecedented breakthroughs in extrahuman intelligence. As Dr. Nguyen struggles to communicate with the newly discovered species, forces larger than DIANIMA close in to seize the octopuses for themselves. But no one has yet asked the octopuses what they think. Or what they might do about it. A near-future thriller, a meditation on the nature of consciousness, and an eco-logical call to arms, Ray Nayler’s dazzling literary debut The Mountain in the Sea is a mind-blowing dive into the treasure and wreckage of humankind’s legacy.
Download or read book Pale Ink written by Henriette Mertz and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on 2020-09-28 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Strange Beasts of China written by Yan Ge and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Editors' Choice and Notable Book of 2021 "Best Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror of 2021"—The Washington Post From one of the most exciting voices in contemporary Chinese literature, an uncanny and playful novel that blurs the line between human and beast… In the fictional Chinese city of Yong’an, an amateur cryptozoologist is commissioned to uncover the stories of its fabled beasts. These creatures live alongside humans in near-inconspicuousness—save their greenish skin, serrated earlobes, and strange birthmarks. Aided by her elusive former professor and his enigmatic assistant, our narrator sets off to document each beast, and is slowly drawn deeper into a mystery that threatens her very sense of self. Part detective story, part metaphysical enquiry, Strange Beasts of China engages existential questions of identity, humanity, love and morality with whimsy and stylistic verve.
Download or read book Chinese Mythology written by Anne Birrell and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1999-04-26 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Chinese Mythology, Anne Birrell provides English translations of some 300 representative myth narratives selected from over 100 classical texts, many of which have never before been translated into any Western language. Organizing the narratives according to themes and motifs common to world mythology, Birrell addresses issues of source, dating, attribution, textural variants, multiforms, and context. Drawing on exhaustive work in comparative mythology, she surveys the development of Chinese myth studies, summarizes the contribution of Chinese and Japanese scholars to the study of Chinese myth since the 1920s, and examines special aspects of traditional approaches to Chinese myth. The result is an unprecedented guide to the study of Chinese myth for specialists and nonspecialists alike.
Download or read book The Shaman and the Heresiarch written by Gopal Sukhu and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book-length study in English of the Chinese classic, the Li sao (Encountering Sorrow). Includes translations of the Li sao and the Nine Songs. The Li sao (also known as Encountering Sorrow), attributed to the poet-statesman Qu Yuan (4th3rd century BCE), is one of the cornerstones of the Chinese poetic tradition. It has long been studied as Chinas first extended allegory in poetic form, yet most scholars agree that there is very little in the two-thousand-year-old tradition of commentary on it that convincingly explains its supernatural flights, its complex floral imagery, or the gender ambiguity of its primary poetic persona. The Shaman and the Heresiarch is the first book-length study of the Li sao in English, offering new translations of both the Li sao and the Nine Songs. The book traces the shortcomings of the earliest extant commentary on those texts, that of Wang Yi, back to the quasi-divinatory methods of the highly politicized tradition of Chinese classical hermeneutics in general, and the political machinations of a Han dynasty empress dowager in particular. It also offers an entirely new interpretation of the Li sao, one based not on Qu Yuan hagiography but on what late Warring States period artifacts and texts, including recently unearthed texts, teach us about the cultural context that produced the poem. In that light we see in the Li sao not only a reflection of the era of the great classical Chinese philosophers, but also the breakdown of the political-religious order of the ancient state of Chu.
Download or read book The Lyrical in Epic Time written by David Der-wei Wang and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-20 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, David Der-wei Wang uses the lyrical to rethink the dynamics of Chinese modernity. Although the form may seem unusual for representing China's social and political crises in the mid-twentieth century, Wang contends that national cataclysm and mass movements intensified Chinese lyricism in extraordinary ways. Wang calls attention to the form's vigor and variety at an unlikely juncture in Chinese history and the precarious consequences it brought about: betrayal, self-abjuration, suicide, and silence. Despite their divergent backgrounds and commitments, the writers, artists, and intellectuals discussed in this book all took lyricism as a way to explore selfhood in relation to solidarity, the role of the artist in history, and the potential for poetry to illuminate crisis. They experimented with poetry, fiction, film, intellectual treatise, political manifesto, painting, calligraphy, and music. Western critics, Wang shows, also used lyricism to critique their perilous, epic time. He reads Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Cleanth Brooks, and Paul de Man, among others, to complete his portrait. The Chinese case only further intensifies the permeable nature of lyrical discourse, forcing us to reengage with the dominant role of revolution and enlightenment in shaping Chinese—and global—modernity. Wang's remarkable survey reestablishes Chinese lyricism's deep roots in its own native traditions, along with Western influences, and realizes the relevance of such a lyrical calling of the past century to our time.
Download or read book Did Ancient Chinese Explore America written by Charlotte Harris Rees and published by Light Messages Publishing. This book was released on 2014-04-23 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Chinese classic, the Shan Hai Jing, reportedly from 2000 BC claimed travels to the ends of the earth. However, today many, while accepting the antiquity of this account, believe it was just mythology. But was it?Testing the hypothesis that the Shan Hai Jing described actual surveys of North America, Charlotte Harris Rees, author of books about early Chinese exploration, followed an alleged 1100 mile Chinese trek along the eastern slope of the US Rocky Mountains. The Chinese account should have been easy to disprove. In the travelogue Did Ancient Chinese Explore America? Rees candidly shares her initial doubts then her search and discoveries. She weaves together history, subtle humor, academic studies, and many photographs to tell a compelling story.
Download or read book In Search of Personal Welfare written by Mu-chou Poo and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major reassessment of ancient Chinese religion to appear in recent years, this book presents the religious mentality of the period through personal and daily experiences.
Download or read book Tales of the Teahouse Retold written by Katherine Liang Chew and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2002 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tales of the Teahouse Retold is based on the author's original translation of Feng Shen Yan Yi, an important volume of Chinese mythology first published during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). It is the story of the overthrow the Shang Dynasty (circa 1766-1122 BC) and the founding of the Chou Dynasty (1122-249 BC). Combining historical facts, folklore, mythology, and legends, these tales describe a time when gods and men, beasts and monsters, and spirits and specters mingled with each other in peace and war. The saga begins when King Zhou of Shang offends the Snail Goddess, who sends three specters to bewitch the king in retribution. The kingdom falls into chaos and civil war ensues, with gods and other supernatural beings taking sides. In the end, many of the slain heroes are invested as gods. For centuries, the tale was told in successive story-telling sessions as teahouse entertainment. The author has faithfully kept to the original style and ambience in retelling these tales. Tales of the Teahouse Retold will be of interest to fans of oriental mythology, philosophy, and literature. It is suitable for recreational reading as well as supplemental reading for students of Chinese history and culture.
Download or read book Here in China I Dwell written by Zhaoguang Ge and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-08-28 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Here in 'China' I Dwell, Ge Zhaoguang sums up a wealth of research on the evolution of Chinese historical narratives, and suggests that viewing China from its borders is the most helpful and objective view moving forward.
Download or read book The Shi King the Old Poetry Classic of the Chinese written by William Jennings and published by . This book was released on 1891 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Prehistoric Maritime Frontier of Southeast China written by Chunming Wu and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book presents multidisciplinary research on the cultural history, ethnic connectivity, and oceanic transportation of the ancient Indigenous Bai Yue (百越) in the prehistoric maritime region of southeast China and southeast Asia. In this maritime Frontier of China, historical documents demonstrate the development of the “barbarian” Bai Yue and Island Yi (岛夷) and their cultural interaction with the northern Huaxia (华夏) in early Chinese civilization within the geopolitical order of the “Central State-Four Peripheries Barbarians-Four Seas”. Archaeological typologies of the prehistoric remains reveal a unique cultural tradition dominantly originating from the local Paleolithic age and continuing to early Neolithization across this border region. Further analysis of material culture from the Neolithic to the Early Iron Age proves the stability and resilience of the indigenous cultures even with the migratory expansion of Huaxia and Han (汉) from north to south. Ethnographical investigations of aboriginal heritage highlight their native cultural context, seafaring technology and navigation techniques, and their interaction with Austronesian and other foreign maritime ethnicities. In a word, this manuscript presents a new perspective on the unique cultural landscape of indigenous ethnicities in southeast China with thousands of years’ stable tradition, a remarkable maritime orientation and overseas cultural hybridization in the coastal region of southeast China.
