Download or read book The Perception of Maritime Space in Traditional Chinese Sources written by Angela Schottenhammer and published by Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. This book was released on 2006 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present collection of essays has originally been prepared for an international conference entitled "Maritime Space in Traditional Chinese Sources" which has been convened by the editors at Munich University in February 2005. The contributions included here introduce various aspects related to East Asian seas - from the Japanese Sea to the South China Sea, with the Yellow and East China Seas constituting the core regions of the entire area - and some of its "adjacent" areas. Although Braudelian categories are inherently present in the discussion and directly addressed in one or two papers, the focus lies on a set of more "basic" variables, which are intimately linked to the idea of contact zones, or alternatively, the parallel (and apparently older) notion that the sea should be seen as a protective belt around the mainland. This volume is consequently primarily concerned with the perception of maritime space in traditional Chinese sources, the division of this space into oceans and seas, the existence, usage and management of trade routes, and, above all, of China's coastal waters, or maritime periphery. For this purpose, in addition to textual sources, maps will be examined as well. As the perception, division and management of maritime space cannot be completely disassociated from other themes - such as trade and travel, diplomacy and military controls, or even daily life during a sea voyage - these aspects were also touched upon in the discussion. But they are of secondary importance and subordinated to the general issue of "geography". With this in mind, following an introductory essay by Angela Schottenhammer, the contributions are divided into three sections: (1) Maritime Space: Trade and Defence; (2) Maritime Space: Coasts, Routes, Oceans; (3) Maritime Space and Maps. The articles by Chang Pin-tsun, Jane Kate Leonard and Jung Byung-chul fall into the first category. Those by Chen Bo / Liu Yingsheng, Sally K. Church, Christine Moll-Murata, Li Tana and Mathieu Torck belong to the second group, while the last section is comprised by the papers of Li Xiaocong, Claudine Salmon and Roderich Ptak.There are many "cross connections" between these essays. Geographically, some of them pertain to the northern spheres, especially the Liaodong-Korea region, others look at the South China Sea, or even at areas far beyond these two. Some are case studies, others deal with general dimensions. The military element, usually in the form of coastal defence, is not only present in the first section, but also in the "cartographic" segment, and in one or two contributions which appear in part two. Furthermore, readers will find that the idea of contact zones, associated with a good degree of open-mindedness towards the "outer world", is present in some texts, just as they will discover that in other cases, the sea still appears as a kind of barrier.

Download or read book The Blue Frontier written by Ronald C. Po and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-23 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that Qing China was not just a continental empire, but a maritime power protecting its interests at sea.

Download or read book China and the Silk Roads ca 100 BCE to 1800 CE written by Angela Schottenhammer and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-09-14 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book investigates China’s relations to the outside world between ca. 100 BCE and 1800 CE. In contrast to most histories of the Silk Roads, the focus of this book clearly lies on the maritime Silk Road and on the period between Tang and high Qing, selecting aspects that have so far been neglected in research on the history of China’s relations with the outside world. The author examines, for example, issue of 'imperialism' in imperial China, the specific role of fanbing 蕃兵 (frontier tribal troops) during Song times, the interrelationship between maritime commerce, military expansion, and environmental factors during the Yuan, the question of whether or not early Ming China can be considered a (proto-)colonialist country, the role force and violence played during the Zheng He expeditions, and the significance the Asia-Pacific world possessed for late Ming and early Qing rulers.

Download or read book The Sea and the Sacred in Japan written by Fabio Rambelli and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-07-12 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sea and the Sacred in Japan is the first book to focus on the role of the sea in Japanese religions. While many leading Shinto deities tend to be understood today as unrelated to the sea, and mountains are considered the privileged sites of sacredness, this book provides new ways to understand Japanese religious culture and history. Scholars from North America, Japan and Europe explore the sea and the sacred in relation to history, culture, politics, geography, worldviews and cosmology, space and borders, and ritual practices and doctrines. Examples include Japanese indigenous conceptualizations of the sea from the Middle Ages to the 20th century; ancient sea myths and rituals; sea deities and sea cults; the role of the sea in Buddhist cosmology; and the international dimension of Japanese Buddhism and its maritime imaginary.

Download or read book The South China Sea written by Bill Hayton and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-28 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China’s rise has upset the global balance of power, and the first place to feel the strain is Beijing’s back yard: the South China Sea. For decades tensions have smoldered in the region, but today the threat of a direct confrontation among superpowers grows ever more likely. This important book is the first to make clear sense of the South Sea disputes. Bill Hayton, a journalist with extensive experience in the region, examines the high stakes involved for rival nations that include Vietnam, India, Taiwan, the Philippines, and China, as well as the United States, Russia, and others. Hayton also lays out the daunting obstacles that stand in the way of peaceful resolution. Through lively stories of individuals who have shaped current conflicts—businessmen, scientists, shippers, archaeologists, soldiers, diplomats, and more—Hayton makes understandable the complex history and contemporary reality of the South China Sea. He underscores its crucial importance as the passageway for half the world’s merchant shipping and one-third of its oil and gas. Whoever controls these waters controls the access between Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and the Pacific. The author critiques various claims and positions (that China has historic claim to the Sea, for example), overturns conventional wisdoms (such as America’s overblown fears of China’s nationalism and military resurgence), and outlines what the future may hold for this clamorous region of international rivalry.

Download or read book The East Asian Mediterranean written by Angela Schottenhammer and published by Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. This book was released on 2008 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume is a collection of papers originally presented for the concluding conference of the research project The East Asian 'Mediterranean' entitled "The East Asian 'Mediterranean' - Maritime Crossroads of Culture, Commerce and Human Migration" and held at Munich University from November 2-3, 2007. The papers in this volume have been arranged according to thematical sections, that is "Mediterranean Seas - from East Asia to East Africa", "Merchants and merchant networks", "Commodities and transport", and finally "Trade parameters and perceptions" - each section covering a different aspect of trade, diplomacy and perceptions across and within the East Asian and Asian waters. In order to show the variety and the different qualities of interaction and exchange relations we have selected case studies with a main focus lying on Sino-Japanese, Sino-Ryukyuan, and Japanese-Korean relations as well as the involvement of Muslim merchants in the Asian waters. The volume in particular tries to draw the readers' attention to the necessity and the advantages of international cooperation and interaction investigating topics of Asian history.

Download or read book Rethinking South China Sea Disputes written by Katherine Hui-Yi Tseng and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The proposed book draws on the on-going South China Sea dispute, and the multifaceted challenges wrought by the South China Sea issue that requires an inter-disciplinary perspective. It employs legal-analytical methods, to emphasize the nuances of the role and interpretation of international law and treaties by China in different periods, while taking into account policy and strategic concerns, which generally cast great sways in decision-making. The re-introduction of interdisciplinary concerns straddling law and history illustrates that the historical dimension, which has long been neglected, is an emerging concern that poses looming dangers that may unexpectedly radicalize the friction. Contributing to debunking the mystique wrought by confrontations between a historical and a law-dominated perspective, these perspectives are supported by a more nuanced analytical framework, featuring theoretical concerns with a tinge of practicality. The South China Sea Dispute aims to unveil a nuanced evolution of the issue with a confluence of inter-temporal law, policy and maritime practices in the South China Sea.

Download or read book Twenty Years of BIMSTEC written by Prabir De and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-16 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reviews the past and provides new strategies to help BIMSTEC achieving a new paradigm of integration. It primarily deals with the regional cooperation and integration issues, and assesses policy priorities, effectiveness, implementation imperatives and challenges. Each chapter in this book tries to capture essential features of the crosscutting issues and attempts to draw some policy implications. The subject of this book will be of special interests to policy planners, development organisations, academicians, researchers as well as potential investors. Please note: T&Fdoes not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Download or read book Shinra My jin and Buddhist Networks of the East Asian Mediterranean written by Sujung Kim and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-11-30 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ambitious work offers a transnational account of the deity Shinra Myōjin, the “god of Silla” worshipped in medieval Japanese Buddhism from the eleventh to sixteenth centuries. Sujung Kim challenges the long-held understanding of Shinra Myōjin as a protective deity of the Tendai Jimon school, showing how its worship emerged and developed in the complex networks of the East Asian “Mediterranean”—a “quality” rather than a physical space defined by Kim as the primary conduit for cross-cultural influence in a region that includes the Yellow Sea, the Sea of Japan (East Sea), the East China Sea, and neighboring coastal areas. While focusing on the transcultural worship of the deity, Kim engages the different maritime arrangements in which Shinra Myōjin circulated: first, the network of Korean immigrants, Chinese merchants, and Japanese Buddhist monks in China’s Shandong peninsula and Japan’s Ōmi Province; and second, that of gods found in the East Asian Mediterranean. Both of these networks became nodal points of exchange of both goods and gods. Kim’s examination of temple chronicles, literary writings, and iconography reveals Shinra Myōjin’s evolution from a seafaring god to a multifaceted one whose roles included the god of pestilence and of poetry, the insurer of painless childbirth, and the protector of performing arts. Shinra Myōjin and Buddhist Networks of the East Asian “Mediterranean” is not only the first monograph in any language on the Tendai Jimon school in Japanese Buddhism, but also the first book-length study in English to examine Korean connections in medieval Japanese religion. Unlike other recent studies on individual Buddhist deities, it foregrounds the need to approach them within a broader East Asian context. By shifting the paradigm from a land-centered vision to a sea-centered one, the work underlines the importance of a transcultural and interdisciplinary approach to the study of Buddhist deities.

Download or read book Voyages Migration and the Maritime World written by Clara Ho and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-09-10 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a multi-author volume resulted from an international conference focusing on topics related to our understanding of the role of China in the global history. Apart from introductory chapters exploring methodological issues and providing big pictures of framing China in the world in particular time zones, this volume also covers rich discussions on the following themes from the ancient period to the twentieth century: organized water transport, cultural interactions, navigators, port cities, smuggling activities, customs service, foreign relations, migration, and diasporas. Written by scholars of different generations who are based in diverse regions including Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, the UK and the US, the chapters in this volume either address old questions from new perspectives, or table new topics that were largely ignored in previous scholarship. Some go further to brainstorm possible research directions in the future. This thought-provoking volume will be beneficial to readers who are interested in rethinking China's position in the global historical stage against the backdrop of Post-Orientalism.

Download or read book East Asian Maritime World Vierzehnhundert Bis Achtzehnhundert written by Angela Schottenhammer and published by Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. This book was released on 2007 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume is a collection of studies discussing aspects of the political economy and raison d'etat of East Asian countries, especially against the background of East Asia's integration into the "international" trade. The contributions progress from the general to the particular, the first contribution, above all, taking a broad perspective, intended as a general outline of the political and economic history of this macro-region. The other contributions examine the "East Asian world order" in ideology and reality, long perspective, supra-regional . ows of money between China and the outer world, the role of castaways and sea routes between Korea and China, Sino-Japanese relations in the mid-sixteenth century, the trade between China and Nagasaki, aspects of Sino-Ryu-kyu-an relations and the role of translators in the East Asian maritime world. The eighteenth century plays a key role in many contributions, and time and again the reader will meet with groups of persons who played a particular role within the exchange networks of this early modern period, such as monks acting as diplomats or interpreters.

Download or read book A Chinese Traveler in Medieval Korea written by Sem Vermeersch and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The king and ministers, superior and inferior, move with ritual and refinement. When the king goes on an inspection tour, everyone has the correct ceremonial attributes and the divine flag [troops] gallop in front while armored soldiers block the road. The soldiers of the Six Divisions all hold their attributes. Although it is not completely in uniformity with classic rites, compared with other barbarians it is splendid to behold. This is why Confucius thought it would not be a shame to reside here. And is not moreover Kija's country a close relative of the hallowed dynasty?" So observed the Song envoy Xu Jing in the official report of his 1123 visit to Korea—a rare eyewitness account of Koryŏ (918–1392) society in its prime. Officially, the purpose of Xu Jing's visit was to condole the new king, Injong, on the death of his father and present him with a letter of investiture; unofficially, he was tasked with persuading Injong to align with Song China against the newly emergent Jin dynasty. Although famous for its celadon and Buddhist paintings, the Koryŏ period is still very much terra incognita in world history because of the lack of translated source materials. The present work, the first fully annotated, complete translation of a key source text on Koryŏ, fills this gap. Xu Jing spent a little more than a month in the Koryŏ capital, Kaesŏng, but he was a meticulous chronicler, compiling a veritable handbook on Koryŏ that is full of fascinating details found nowhere else on daily life, history, customs and manners, buildings, the military, food, among others. However, Xu Jing was not unbiased in his observations and supplemented his work with unreliable information from earlier chronicles—a fact often ignored in previous studies of the Illustrated Account. In a substantial introduction to his translation, Sem Vermeersch not only places this important work in its historical context, but also reveals both the sources used by the author and the merits and limits of his observations, allowing historians of medieval Korea to make fuller use of this singular primary source.

Download or read book Avoiding the Dire Straits written by Mathieu Torck and published by Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. This book was released on 2009 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scurvy is known to be one of the most gruesome pathological phenomena that, in the course of centuries, has made innumerable victims. Long distance seafaring operations, war zones, prisons and crop failures all created breeding grounds for the vitamin C defi ciency disease, which was commonly characterized by swelling and bleeding gums and internal haemorraghes in the limbs. While the history of scurvy is rather well-known from a Western perspective, the higher proneness to scurvy of Asian peoples in comparison to Europeans, Polynesians and other peoples, as proven in recent biochemical studies, compelled to broaden that horizon and look for scurvy in China and beyond. The purpose of this book is to trace the history of the disease in China, Japan and Southeast Asia and to highlight the ways in which peoples from these regions in pre-modern and early modern times dealt with provisioning in their seafaring and military enterprises. This cross-cultural quest for scurvy and food supplies, involving such areas as maritime and military history and the medical traditions from East and West, is ultimately meant as an attempt to elucidate whether historical sources can confirm the biochemical findings.

Download or read book Rage and Ravage written by Bernard Faure and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2021-12-31 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by one of the leading scholars of Japanese religion, Rage and Ravage is the third installment of a milestone project in our understanding of the mythico-ritual system of esoteric Buddhism—specifically the nature and roles of deities in the religious world of medieval Japan and beyond. Bernard Faure introduces readers to medieval Japanese religiosity and shows the centrality of the gods in religious discourse and ritual; in doing so he moves away from the usual textual, historical, and sociological approaches that constitute the “method” of current religious studies. Throughout, he engages theoretical insights drawn from structuralism, post-structuralism, and Actor-Network Theory to retrieve the “implicit pantheon” (as opposed to the “explicit orthodox pantheon”) of esoteric Japanese Buddhism (Mikkyō). In volumes one and two, The Fluid Pantheon and Protectors and Predators, Faure argued against a polarity or dichotomy between buddhas and kami by emphasizing the existence of deities that did not belong to either category, and he rejected the retrospective notion of “hybridity.” The present work makes a similar case about the reified distinction between gods and demons to show that, due to the fluid nature of the Japanese pantheon, these terms do not represent stable identities: Gods can become demons, and demons are sometimes deified. Divine protectors were often former predators, and in some instances they retained their predatory features even after being converted. After emphasizing the demonic aspects of devas as “gods or spirits of obstacles” in the earlier volumes, Faure now focuses on the deva-like or “divine” aspects of deities that have been described as “demonic.” Rage and Ravage and its companion volumes persuade readers that the gods constituted a central part of medieval Japanese religion and that the latter cannot be reduced to a simplistic confrontation, parallelism, or complementarity between some monolithic teachings known as “Buddhism” and “Shinto.” Once these reductionist labels and categories are discarded, a new and fascinating religious landscape begins to unfold.

Download or read book The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean Volume 1 The Pacific Ocean to 1800 written by Ryan Tucker Jones and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-31 with total page 948 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume I of The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean provides a wide-ranging survey of Pacific history to 1800. It focuses on varied concepts of the Pacific environment and its impact on human history, as well as tracing the early exploration and colonization of the Pacific, the evolution of Indigenous maritime cultures after colonization, and the disruptive arrival of Europeans. Bringing together a diversity of subjects and viewpoints, this volume introduces a broad variety of topics, engaging fully with emerging environmental and political conflicts over Pacific Ocean spaces. These essays emphasize the impact of the deep history of interactions on and across the Pacific to the present day.

Download or read book Reconstructing a Maritime Past written by Matthew Harpster and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-30 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconstructing a Maritime Past argues that rather than applying geo-ethnic labels to shipwrecks to describe “Greek” or “Roman” seafaring, a more intriguing alternative emphasizes a maritime culture’s valorization of the Mediterranean Sea. Doing so creates new questions and research agendas to understand the past human relationship with the sea. This study makes this argument in three sections. Chapters 1 and 2, contrasting intellectual histories of maritime archaeological interpretive approaches common in Northern Europe and the Mediterranean, propose that the former perspective – which embodies contemporary and fluid perceptions of culture – is a better theoretical framework for future research. Chapters 3–5 re-interpret the corpus of submerged sites in the Mediterranean Sea with this approach, arguing that this dataset does not represent “Phoenician,” “Muslim,” or “Byzantine” seafaring, but the practices of a maritime culture. Key to this section is the author’s method that utilizes superimposed polygons to model patterns of maritime activity, generating centennial results at different scales. Having built the models of a maritime culture’s valorization of the Mediterranean Sea, Chapter 6 contains the first comparisons of these models to other datasets, questioning the relevance of textual media to understand maritime activity, while finding closer analogues with other archaeological corpora. By deconstructing interpretive methods in maritime archaeology, offering a new synthesizing interpretive approach that is scalable and decoupled from past perceptions, and critically examining the applicability of various media to illuminate the past maritime experience, this book will appeal to scholars at various stages of their careers.

Download or read book Civil Military Relations in Chinese History written by Kai Filipiak and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-17 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern studies of civil--military relations recognise that the military is separate from civil society, with its own norms and values, principles of organization, and regulations. Key issues of concern include the means by which – and the extent to which – the civil power controls the military; and also the ways in which military values and approaches permeate and affect wider society. This book examines these issues in relation to China, covering the full range of Chinese history from the Zhou, Qin, and Han dynasties up to the Communist takeover in 1949. It traces how civil--military relations were different in different periods, explores how military specialization and professionalization developed, and reveals how military weakness often occurred when the civil authority with weak policies exerted power over the military. Overall, the book shows how attitudes to the military’s role in present day Communist China were forged in earlier periods.