Download or read book The Military Collapse of China s Ming Dynasty 1618 44 written by Kenneth M. Swope and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-23 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the military collapse of China’s Ming Dynasty to a combination of foreign and domestic foes. The Ming’s defeat was a highly surprising development, not least because as recently as in the 1590s the Ming had managed to defeat a Japanese force considered to be perhaps the most formidable of its day when the latter attempted to subjugate Korea en-route to a planned invasion of China. In contrast to conventional explanations for the Ming’s collapse, which focus upon political and socio-economic factors, this book shows how the military collapse of the Ming state was intimately connected to the deterioration of the personal relationship between the Ming throne and the military establishment that had served as the cornerstone of the Ming military renaissance of the previous decades. Moreover, it examines the broader process of the militarization of late Ming society as a whole to arrive at an understanding of how a state with such tremendous military resources and potential could be defeated by numerically and technologically inferior foes. It concludes with a consideration of the fall of the Ming in light of contemporary conflicts and regime changes around the globe, drawing attention to climatological factors and developments outside state control. Utilizing recently released archival materials, this book adds a much needed piece to the puzzle of the collapse of the Ming Dynasty in China.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of the Ming Dynasty written by Daniel R. Faust and published by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. This book was released on 2016-07-15 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coming to power between Mongol and Manchu rule, the Ming Dynasty represented the last ethnic Han dynasty to rule China. Following the Mandate of Heaven, the first Ming emperor launched nearly 300 years of cultural and political transformation. This compelling volume traces the ascendancy, demise, and legacy of the Ming Dynasty, chronicling the development of its governmental structure, its expansion of trade and its economy, its extension and enhancement of the Great Wall of China, and many other achievements. Readers will also learn about the effect of the Little Ice Age and its role in the Ming’s demise.
Download or read book 1587 a Year of No Significance written by Ray Huang and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1981-01-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Creates a portrait of the world and culture of late imperial China by examining the lives of seven prominent officials and members of the Ming ruling class
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of the Ming Dynasty written by Daniel R. Faust and published by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. This book was released on 2016-07-15 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coming to power between Mongol and Manchu rule, the Ming Dynasty represented the last ethnic Han dynasty to rule China. Following the Mandate of Heaven, the first Ming emperor launched nearly 300 years of cultural and political transformation. This compelling volume traces the ascendancy, demise, and legacy of the Ming Dynasty, chronicling the development of its governmental structure, its expansion of trade and its economy, its extension and enhancement of the Great Wall of China, and many other achievements. Readers will also learn about the effect of the Little Ice Age and its role in the Ming’s demise.
Download or read book The Fall of the Ming Dynasty written by Thomas Lorondes Bullock and published by . This book was released on 1888 with total page 10 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Glory and Fall of the Ming Dynasty written by Albert Chan and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the government, economy, social structure, and history of the Ming dynasty, and offers a picture of what life was like in China between 1368 and 1644.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of a Public Debt Market in 16th Century China written by Wing-kin Puk and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-11-16 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), the government invited merchants to deliver grain in return for salt certificates with which merchants drew salt as reward. The salt certificate therefore represented a national debt, denominated in salt, the government thereby owed merchants. A speculative market of salt certificates was created in Yangzhou and brought into being powerful financiers in the early 17th century. The government, financially hard pressed, abolished the speculative market of salt certificates by franchising these financiers in return for their hereditary obligation to pay salt certificate surcharge. China was therefore deprived of a possibility to develop a public debt market. This story is a testimony to Fernand Braudel’s argument of the "nondevelopment" of Capitalism in China.
Download or read book The Troubled Empire written by Timothy Brook and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-11 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mongol takeover in the 1270s changed the course of Chinese history. The Confucian empireÑa millennium and a half in the makingÑwas suddenly thrust under foreign occupation. What China had been before its reunification as the Yuan dynasty in 1279 was no longer what it would be in the future. Four centuries later, another wave of steppe invaders would replace the Ming dynasty with yet another foreign occupation. The Troubled Empire explores what happened to China between these two dramatic invasions. If anything defined the complex dynamics of this period, it was changes in the weather. Asia, like Europe, experienced a Little Ice Age, and as temperatures fell in the thirteenth century, Kublai Khan moved south into China. His Yuan dynasty collapsed in less than a century, but Mongol values lived on in Ming institutions. A second blast of cold in the 1630s, combined with drought, was more than the dynasty could stand, and the Ming fell to Manchu invaders. Against this backgroundÑthe first coherent ecological history of China in this periodÑTimothy Brook explores the growth of autocracy, social complexity, and commercialization, paying special attention to ChinaÕs incorporation into the larger South China Sea economy. These changes not only shaped what China would become but contributed to the formation of the early modern world.
Download or read book Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation written by David Der-wei Wang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This volume addresses cultural and literary transformation in the late Ming (1550–1644) and late Qing (1851–1911) eras. Although conventionally associated with a devastating sociopolitical crisis, each of these periods was also a time when Chinese culture was rejuvenated. Focusing on the twin themes of crisis and innovation, the seventeen chapters in this book aim to illuminate the late Ming and late Qing as eras of literary-cultural innovation during periods of imperial disintegration; to analyze linkages between the two periods and the radical heritage they bequeathed to the modern imagination; and to rethink the “premodernity” of the late Ming and late Qing in the context of the end of the age of modernism. The chapters touch on a remarkably wide spectrum of works, some never before discussed in English, such as poetry, drama, full-length novels, short stories, tanci narratives, newspaper articles, miscellanies, sketches, familiar essays, and public and private historical accounts. More important, they intersect on issues ranging from testimony about dynastic decline to the negotiation of authorial subjectivity, from the introduction of cultural technology to the renewal of literary convention."
Download or read book Trauma and Transcendence in Early Qing Literature written by Wilt L. Idema and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collapse of the Ming dynasty and the Manchu conquest of China were traumatic experiences for Chinese intellectuals. The 12 chapters in this volume and the introductory essays on early Qing poetry, prose, and drama understand the writings of this era wholly or in part as attempts to recover from or transcend the trauma of the transition years.
Download or read book The Confusions of Pleasure written by Timothy Brook and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1998-05-18 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ming dynasty was the last great Chinese dynasty before the Manchu conquest in 1644. During that time, China, not Europe, was the center of the world: the European voyages of exploration were searching not just for new lands but also for new trade routes to the Far East. In this book, Timothy Brook eloquently narrates the changing landscape of life over the three centuries of the Ming (1368-1644), when China was transformed from a closely administered agrarian realm into a place of commercial profits and intense competition for status. The Confusions of Pleasure marks a significant departure from the conventional ways in which Chinese history has been written. Rather than recounting the Ming dynasty in a series of political events and philosophical achievements, it narrates this longue durée in terms of the habits and strains of everyday life. Peppered with stories of real people and their negotiations of a rapidly changing world, this book provides a new way of seeing the Ming dynasty that not only contributes to the scholarly understanding of the period but also provides an entertaining and accessible introduction to Chinese history for anyone.
Download or read book Voices from the Ming Qing Cataclysm written by Lynn A. Struve and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating book presents eyewitness accounts of a turbulent period in Chinese history: the fall of the Ming dynasty and the conquest of China by the Manchus in the mid-seventeenth century. Lynn A. Struve has translated, introduced, and annotated absorbing testimonies from a wide range of individuals in different social stations--Chinese and Europeans, missionaries and viceroys, artists and merchants, Ming loyalists and Qing collaborators, maidservants and eunuchs--all telling stories of hardship and challenge in the midst of cataclysmic change. "It is a book that brings history graphically to life."--Keith Pratt, Asian Affairs "A fascinating view of the dynamics of dynastic change in China."--Jonathan Porter, History "The book combines skillful translation of a rich variety of primary sources with authoritative commentary and meticulously researched annotation."--Helen Dunstan, Historian "One of the most engaging works of scholarship to appear in the field for a long time. . . . An extraordinarily good book destined to be read and enjoyed by a very wide audience beyond the professional one."--Craig Clunas, Bulletin of SOAS "Struve is] the most knowledgeable American scholar of the history of the 'Southern Ming.' . . . This fascinating volume . . . can be readily used in any college course on late imperial Chinese history for wonderful examples of the personal experiences of the Chinese people living through the fall of the Ming dynasty to their Manchu conquerors."--Benjamin A. Elman, China Review International "The scholarship behind this work is impeccable. . . . The translations are an important contribution to the field."--Jerry Dennerline, International History Review "Throughout the volume, Struve's translations capture the different voices of the cataclysm. Students of Chinese history will find a wealth of information here."--Choice
Download or read book The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World written by Lynn A. Struve and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-03-31 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the mid-sixteenth through the end of the seventeenth century, Chinese intellectuals attended more to dreams and dreaming—and in a wider array of genres—than in any other period of Chinese history. Taking the approach of cultural history, this ambitious yet accessible work aims both to describe the most salient aspects of this “dream arc” and to explain its trajectory in time through the writings, arts, and practices of well-known thinkers, religionists, litterateurs, memoirists, painters, doctors, and political figures of late Ming and early Qing times. The volume’s encompassing thesis asserts that certain associations of dreaming, grounded in the neurophysiology of the human brain at sleep—such as subjectivity, irrationality, the unbidden, lack of control, emotionality, spontaneity, the imaginal, and memory—when especially heightened by historical and cultural developments, are likely to pique interest in dreaming and generate florescences of dream-expression among intellectuals. The work thus makes a contribution to the history of how people have understood human consciousness in various times and cultures. The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World is the most substantial work in any language on the historicity of Chinese dream culture. Within Chinese studies, it will appeal to those with backgrounds in literature, religion, philosophy, political history, and the visual arts. It will also be welcomed by readers interested in comparative dream cultures, the history of consciousness, and neurohistory.
Download or read book The Decline and Fall of the Ming Dynasty written by Albert Chan and published by . This book was released on 1954 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty written by Shih-shan Henry Tsai and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first on Chinese eunuchs in English and presents a comprehensive picture of the role that they played in the Ming dynasty, 1368-1644. Extracted from a wide range of primary and secondary source material, the author provides significant and interesting information about court politics, espionage and internal security, military and foreign affairs, tax and tribute collection, the operation of imperial monopolies, judiciary review, the layout of the palace complex, the Grand Canal, and much more. The eunuchs are shown to be not just a minor adjunct to a government of civil servants and military officers, but a fully developed third branch of the Ming administration that participated in all of the most essential matters of the dynasty. The veil of condemnation and jealousy imposed on eunuchs by the compilers of official history is pulled away to reveal a richly textured tapestry. Eunuchs are portrayed in a balanced manner that gives due consideration to able and faithful service along with the inept, the lurid, and the iniquitous.
Download or read book Falling in Love written by and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2006-05-31 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Falling in love, with all its accompanying problems, was a subject of obsessive interest among writers and readers in the Ming Dynasty, when society held strictly to arranged marriages. The stories in this engaging collection all deal with this theme in very different ways, sometimes comically, sometimes tragically. They portray young people choosing their own lovers, resorting to ingenious stratagems and risky escapades in defiance of contemporary mores. Chosen to represent the best works from the great age of the vernacular story, they offer an admirable introduction to the world of Chinese fiction in this era. All of the stories in Falling in Love have been translated especially for this volume, and most appear here in translation for the first time. They are taken from two works, Constant Words to Awaken the World (Xing shi heng yan) and a related collection, The Rocks Nod Their Heads (Shi dian tou), both published in the early seventeenth century.
Download or read book Ming China and its Allies written by David M. Robinson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-02 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the Ming Dynasty's foreign relations with neighboring sovereigns, placing China in a wider global context.
