Download or read book The Ming World written by Kenneth M Swope and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-08 with total page 845 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ming World draws together scholars from all over the world to bring China’s Ming Dynasty (1368-1662) to life, exploring recent scholarly trends and academic debates that highlight the dynamism of the Ming and its key place in the early modern world. The book is designed to replicate the structure of popular Ming-era unofficial histories that gathered information and gossip from a wide variety of fields and disciplines. Engaging with a broad array of primary and secondary sources, the authors build upon earlier scholarship while extending the field to embrace new theories, methodologies, and interpretive frameworks. It is divided into five thematically linked sections: Institutions, Ideas, Identities, Individuals, and Interactions. Unique in its breadth and scope, The Ming World is essential reading for scholars and postgraduates of early modern China, the history of East Asia and anyone interested in gaining a broader picture of the colorful Ming world and its inhabitants.
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 Home and the World written by Yuming He and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China’s sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an unprecedented explosion in the production and circulation of woodblock-printed books. What can surviving traces of that era’s print culture reveal about the makers and consumers of these books? Home and the World addresses this question by carefully examining a wide range of late Ming books, considering them not merely as texts, but as material objects and economic commodities designed, produced, and marketed to stand out in the distinctive book marketplace of the time, and promising high enjoyment and usefulness to readers. Although many of the mass-market commercial imprints studied here might have struck scholars from the eighteenth century on as too trivial, lowbrow, or slipshod to merit serious study, they prove to be an invaluable resource, providing insight into their readers’ orientations toward the increasingly complex global stage of early modernity and toward traditional Chinese conceptions of textual, political, and moral authority. On a more intimate scale, they tell us about readers’ ideals of a fashionable and pleasurable private life. Through studying these works, we come closer to recapturing the trend-conscious, sophisticated, and often subversive ways readers at this important moment in China’s history imagined their world and their place within it. 2015 Joseph Levenson Book Prize, Pre-1900 Category, China and Inner Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies
Download or read book Ming China 1368 1644 written by John W. Dardess and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2012 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This engaging, deeply informed book provides the first concise history of one of China's most important eras. Leading scholar John W. Dardess offers a thematically organized political, social, and economic exploration of China from 1368 to 1644. He examines how the Ming dynasty was able to endure for 276 years, illuminating Ming foreign relations and border control, the lives and careers of its sixteen emperors, its system of governance and the kinds of people who served it, its great class of literati, and finally the mass outlawry that, in unhappy conjunction with the Manchu invasions from outside, ended the once-mighty dynasty in the mid-seventeenth century. The Ming witnessed the beginning of China's contact with the West, and its story will fascinate all readers interested in global as well as Asian history.
Download or read book Stories to Awaken the World written by and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 992 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories to Awaken the World, the first complete translation of Xingshi hengyan, completes the publication in English of the famous three-volume set of Feng Menglong's popular Chinese-vernacular stories. These tales, which come from a variety of sources (some dating back centuries before their compilation in the seventeenth century), were assembled and circulated by Feng, who not only saved them from oblivion but raised the status of vernacular literature and provided material for authors of the great Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) novels to draw upon. This trilogy has been compared to Boccaccio's Decameron and the stories of A Thousand and One Nights. Peopled with scholars, emperors, ministers, generals, and a gallery of ordinary men and women - merchants and artisans, prostitutes and courtesans, matchmakers and fortune-tellers, monks and nuns, thieves and imposters - the stories provide a vivid panorama of the bustling world of late imperial China. The longest volume in the Sanyan trilogy, Stories to Awaken the World is presented in full here, including sexually explicit elements often omitted from Chinese editions. Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang have provided a rare treat for English readers: an unparalleled view of the art of traditional Chinese short fiction. As with the first two collections in the trilogy, Stories Old and New and Stories to Caution the World, their excellent renditions of the forty stories in this collection are eminently readable, accurate, and lively. They have included all of the poetry that is scattered throughout the stories, as well as Feng Menglong's interlinear and marginal comments, which convey the values shared among the Chinese cultural elite, point out what original readers of the collection were being asked to appreciate in the writer's art, and reveal Feng's moral engagement with the social problems of his day. The Yangs's translations rank among the very finest English versions of Chinese fiction from any period. For other titles in the collection go to http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/books/ming.html
Download or read book From Object to Concept written by Stacey Pierson and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ming porcelain is widely regarded among the world's finest cultural treasures. From ordinary household items patiently refined for imperial use, porcelain became a dynamic force in domestic consumption in China and a valuable commodity in export trade. In the modern era, it has reached unprecedented heights in art auctions and other avenues of global commerce. This book examines the impact of consumption on the evolution of porcelain and its transformation into a foreign cultural icon. The book begins with an examination of ways in which porcelain was appreciated in Ming China, followed by a discussion of encounters with Ming porcelain in several global regions including Europe and the Americas. The book also looks at the invention of the phrase and concept of 'the Ming vase' in English-speaking cultures and concludes with a history of the transformation of Ming porcelain into works of art.
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 Ming and Flo Fight for the Future The Girls Who Changed the World 1 written by Jackie French and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An empowering and exhilarating look at the girls who went before us, and the way they shaped the world. Twelve-year-old Ming Qong is convinced that girls must have changed the world, even if they are rarely mentioned in history books. So when Ming gets the chance to go back in time, she imagines herself changing destinies from a glittering palace or an explorer's ship. Instead, she ends up in Australia in 1898, living a tough life as Flo Watson on a drought-stricken farm. Luckily, Ming is rescued by Flo's Aunt McTavish. Wealthy Aunt McTavish belongs to Louisa Lawson's Suffragist Society, who are desperately and courageously fighting for women's rights. And Ming is determined to get involved, to make a difference. But change is never easy, so how can one girl change the world? From one of Australia's favourite writers comes an inspiring new series for all the young people who will, one day, change the world. AWARDS Notable - CBCA Younger Reader's Book 2023
Download or read book A Ming Confucians World written by Lu Lu Rong and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A forgotten century marks the years between the Ming dynasty?s (1368?1644) turbulent founding and its sixteenth-century age of exploration and economic transformation. In this period of social stability, retired scholar-official Lu Rong chronicled his observations of Chinese society in Miscellaneous Records from the Bean Garden (Shuyuan zaji). Openly expressing his admirations and frustrations, Lu provides a window into the quotidian that sets Bean Garden apart from other works of the biji genre of ?informal notes.? Mark Halperin organizes a translated selection of Lu?s accounts from Miscellaneous Records from the Bean Garden to create a panorama of Ming life. A man of unusual curiosity, Lu describes multiple social classes, ethnicities, and locales in his accounts of political intrigues, farming techniques, religious practices, etiquette, crime, and family life. Centuries after their composition, Lu?s words continue to provide a richly textured portrait of China on the cusp of the early modern era.
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 2021-05-31 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 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 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 Zheng He written by Edward L. Dreyer and published by Longman Publishing Group. This book was released on 2007 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new biography, part of Longman's World Biography series, of the Chinese explorer Zheng He sheds new light on one of the most important "what if" questions of early modern history: why a technically advanced China did not follow the same path of development as the major European powers. Written by China scholar Edward L. Dreyer, Zheng He outlines what is known of the eunuch Zheng He's life and describes and analyzes the early 15th century voyages on the basis of the Chinese evidence. Locating the voyages firmly within the context of early Ming history,itaddresses the political motives of Zheng He's voyages and how they affected China's exclusive attitude to the outside world in subsequent centuries.
Download or read book The Culture of Language in Ming China written by Nathan Vedal and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-13 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2023 Morris D. Forkosch Prize, Journal of the History of Ideas The scholarly culture of Ming dynasty China (1368–1644) is often seen as prioritizing philosophy over concrete textual study. Nathan Vedal uncovers the preoccupation among Ming thinkers with specialized linguistic learning, a field typically associated with the intellectual revolution of the eighteenth century. He explores the collaboration of Confucian classicists and Buddhist monks, opera librettists and cosmological theorists, who joined forces in the pursuit of a universal theory of language. Drawing on a wide range of overlooked scholarly texts, literary commentaries, and pedagogical materials, Vedal examines how Ming scholars positioned the study of language within an interconnected nexus of learning. He argues that for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers, the boundaries among the worlds of classicism, literature, music, cosmology, and religion were far more fluid and porous than they became later. In the eighteenth century, Qing thinkers pared away these other fields from linguistic learning, creating a discipline focused on corroborating the linguistic features of ancient texts. Documenting a major transformation in knowledge production, this book provides a framework for rethinking global early modern intellectual developments. It offers a powerful alternative to the conventional understanding of late imperial Chinese intellectual history by focusing on the methods of scholarly practice and the boundaries by which contemporary thinkers defined their field of study.
Download or read book In the Shadow of the Mongol Empire written by David M. Robinson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-21 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memories of the Mongol Empire loomed large in fourteenth-century Eurasia. Robinson explores how Ming China exploited these memories for its own purposes.
Download or read book Ming Furniture in the Light of Chinese Architecture written by Sarah Handler and published by Ten Speed Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to place Ming furniture design within the context of Chinese architectural intent. Illustrating spectacular examples of Ming furniture from private and museum collections around the world; construction and function come together in a harmonious and indivisible whole.
Download or read book Ming written by Craig Clunas and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ask anyone what single object they associate with China and the most common answer will be a Ming vase. Probably without even knowing the dates of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), people are aware of the fragility of its porcelain, its rarity and value. But porcelain is just one part of the story of one of the most glorious epoques of China's past. By focusing on the significant years of the early Ming dynasty and through the themes of court people and their lives, extraordinary developments in culture, the military, religion, diplomacy and trade, this book brings the wider history of this fascinating period to colourful life.
