Download or read book A Biographical Dictionary of the Qin Former Han and Xin Periods 221 BC AD 24 written by Michael Loewe and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2000-04-18 with total page 864 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a unique and conclusive reference work about the 6,000 individual men and women known to us from China’s formative first empires. Over decennia Michael Loewe (Cambridge, UK) has painstakingly collected all biographical information available. Not only those are dealt with who set the literary forms and intellectual background of traditional China, such as writers, scholars, historians and philosophers, but also those officials who administered the empire, and the military leaders who fought in civil warfare or with China’s neighbours. The work draws on primary historical sources as interpreted by Chinese, Japanese and Western scholars and as supplemented by archaeological finds and inscriptions. By devoting extensive entries to each of the emperors the author provides the reader with the necessary historical context and gives insight into the dynastic disputes and their far-reaching consequences. No comparable work exists for this important period of Chinese history. Without exaggeration a real must for historians of both China and other cultures.
Download or read book Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women written by and published by M.E. Sharpe. This book was released on with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Biographical Dictionary of Later Han to the Three Kingdoms 23 220 AD written by Rafe de Crespigny and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2006-12-01 with total page 1347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This publication is the long-awaited complement to Michael Loewe's acclaimed Biographical Dictionary of the Qin, Former Han and Xin Periods (2000). With more than 8,000 entries, based upon historical records and surviving inscriptions, the comprehensive Biographical Dictionary of Later Han to the Three Kingdoms (23-220 AD) now provides information on men and women of the Chinese world who lived at the time of Later (or Eastern) Han, from Liu Xiu, founding Emperor Guangwu (reg. 24-57), to the celebrated warlord Cao Cao (155-220) at the end of the dynasty. The entries, including surnames, personal names, styles and dates, are accompanied by maps, genealogical tables and indexes, with lists of books and special accounts of women. These features, together with the convenient surveys of the history and the administrative structure of the dynasty, will make Rafe de Crespigny's work an indispensable tool for any further serious study of a significant but comparatively neglected period of imperial China.
Download or read book Ancient Egypt and Early China written by Anthony J. Barbieri-Low and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2021-07-17 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although they existed more than a millennium apart, the great civilizations of New Kingdom Egypt (ca. 1548–1086 BCE) and Han dynasty China (206 BCE–220 CE) shared intriguing similarities. Both were centered around major, flood-prone rivers—the Nile and the Yellow River—and established complex hydraulic systems to manage their power. Both spread their territories across vast empires that were controlled through warfare and diplomacy and underwent periods of radical reform led by charismatic rulers—the “heretic king” Akhenaten and the vilified reformer Wang Mang. Universal justice was dispensed through courts, and each empire was administered by bureaucracies staffed by highly trained scribes who held special status. Egypt and China each developed elaborate conceptions of an afterlife world and created games of fate that facilitated access to these realms. This groundbreaking volume offers an innovative comparison of these two civilizations. Through a combination of textual, art historical, and archaeological analyses, Ancient Egypt and Early China reveals shared structural traits of each civilization as well as distinctive features.
Download or read book Berkshire Dictionary of Chinese Biography written by Kerry Brown and published by Berkshire Publishing Group. This book was released on 2017-12-27 with total page 1735 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Berkshire Dictionary of Chinese Biography, the first publication of its kind since 1898, is the work of more than one hundred internationally recognized experts from nearly a dozen countries. It has been designed to satisfy the growing thirst of students, researchers, professionals, and general readers for knowledge about China. It makes the entire span of Chinese history manageable by introducing the reader to emperors, politicians, poets, writers, artists, scientists, explorers, and philosophers who have shaped and transformed China over the course of five thousand years. In 135 entries, ranging from 1,000 to 8,000 words and written by some of the world's leading China scholars, the Berkshire Dictionary of Chinese Biography takes the reader from the important (even if possibly mythological) figures of ancient China to Communist leaders Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. The in-depth essays provide rich historical context, and create a compelling narrative that weaves abstract concepts and disparate events into a coherent story. Cross-references between the articles show the connections between times, places, movements, events, and individuals.
Download or read book Readings in Han Chinese Thought written by and published by Hackett Publishing. This book was released on 2006-09-15 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The intellectual contributions of the Han (206 BCE-CE 220) have for too long received short shrift in introductory anthologies of Chinese thought. It was during the Han's unprecedented centuries-long unification of China that a canon of classical texts emerged, syncretic and scholastic trends transformed the legacy of pre-imperial philosophy, and popular religious movements shook official verities. With Mark Csikszentmihalyi's collection, readers at last have an accessible, eclectic introduction to the key themes of thought during this crucial period. Providing clear introductory essays and elegant, readable translations, Csikszentmihalyi exercises a judicious revisionism by breaking down stereotypes of philosophical orthodoxy and offering a subtler vision of cross-fertilization in thought. His juxtaposition of texts that reflect very different social milieux and their problems gives a more vivid picture of the Han than has ever before been available in an English-language collection. The result is a work that should by rights be required reading in intellectual history courses for years to come. --David Schaberg, University of California, Los Angeles
Download or read book The Essentials of Governance written by Wu Jing and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-21 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the eighth century, Wu Jing selected exchanges between Emperor Taizong and his ministers that he deemed key to good governance. This collection of dialogues has been used for the education of emperors, political elites and general readers ever since, and is a standard reference work in East Asian political thought. Consisting of ten volumes, subdivided into forty topics, The Essentials of Governance addresses core themes of Chinese thinking about the politics of power, from the body politic, presenting and receiving criticism, recruitment, the education of the imperial clan, political virtues and vices, to cultural policy, agriculture, law, taxation, border policy, and how to avoid disaster and dynastic fall. Presented with introductory commentary that offers insights into its historical context and global reception, this accessible and reliable translation brings together ten scholars of Chinese intellectual history to offer a nuanced edition that preserves the organisation, tone and flow of the original.
Download or read book Public Memory in Early China written by K. E. Brashier and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early imperial China, the dead were remembered by stereotyping them, by relating them to the existing public memory and not by vaunting what made each person individually distinct and extraordinary in his or her lifetime. Their posthumous names were chosen from a limited predetermined pool; their descriptors were derived from set phrases in the classical tradition; and their identities were explicitly categorized as being like this cultural hero or that sage official in antiquity. In other words, postmortem remembrance was a process of pouring new ancestors into prefabricated molds or stamping them with rigid cookie cutters. Public Memory in Early China is an examination of this pouring and stamping process. After surveying ways in which learning in the early imperial period relied upon memorization and recitation, K. E. Brashier treats three definitive parameters of identity—name, age, and kinship—as ways of negotiating a person’s relative position within the collective consciousness. He then examines both the tangible and intangible media responsible for keeping that defined identity welded into the infrastructure of Han public memory.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Chinese History written by Michael Dillon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 1223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China has become accessible to the west in the last twenty years in a way that was not possible in the previous thirty. The number of westerners travelling to China to study, for business or for tourism has increased dramatically and there has been a corresponding increase in interest in Chinese culture, society and economy and increasing coverage of contemporary China in the media. Our understanding of China’s history has also been evolving. The study of history in the People’s Republic of China during the Mao Zedong period was strictly regulated and primary sources were rarely available to westerners or even to most Chinese historians. Now that the Chinese archives are open to researchers, there is a growing body of academic expertise on history in China that is open to western analysis and historical methods. This has in many ways changed the way that Chinese history, particularly the modern period, is viewed. The Encyclopedia of Chinese History covers the entire span of Chinese history from the period known primarily through archaeology to the present day. Treating Chinese history in the broadest sense, the Encyclopedia includes coverage of the frontier regions of Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet that have played such an important role in the history of China Proper and will also include material on Taiwan, and on the Chinese diaspora. In A-Z format with entries written by experts in the field of Chinese Studies, the Encyclopedia will be an invaluable resource for students of Chinese history, politics and culture.
Download or read book Rising Sons The China s Imperial Succession The Art Of War written by Ian Huen and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rising Sons: China's Imperial Succession & The Art of War recollects 2,000 years of China's history by examining how some of its most representative imperial rulers seized power by applying tactics and strategies from Sun Tzu's The Art of War. This volume brings together tales of the nine princes of the Qin to Qing dynasties who rose to power through their cunning wit and prowess at psychological warfare. Brimming in equal measure with narrative interest and analytical insight, this book is as much a page turner about human greed, ambition and its capacity for cruelty as it is a treatise on power dynamics and court politics.
Download or read book A History of Civil Law in Early China Cases Statutes Concepts and Beyond written by Zhaoyang Zhang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-07-11 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the careful examination of cases, statutes and terminology preserved in both excavated and transmitted materials, this book argues that a civil law with distinctive Chinese characteristics emerged during the Qin and Han dynasties (221 B.C.-A.D. 220).
Download or read book Heavenly Numbers written by Christopher Cullen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a history of the development of mathematical astronomy in China, from the late third century BCE, to the early 3rd century CE - a period often referred to as 'early imperial China'. It narrates the changes in ways of understanding the movements of the heavens and the heavenly bodies that took place during those four and a half centuries, and tells the stories of the institutions and individuals involved in those changes. It gives clear explanations of technical practice in observation, instrumentation, and calculation, and the steady accumulation of data over many years - but it centres on the activity of the individual human beings who observed the heavens, recorded what they saw, and made calculations to analyse and eventually make predictions about the motions of the celestial bodies. It is these individuals, their observations, their calculations, and the words they left to us that provide the narrative thread that runs through this work. Throughout the book, the author gives clear translations of original material that allow the reader direct access to what the people in this book said about themselves and what they tried to do.
Download or read book Chang an 26 BCE written by Michael Nylan and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2015-05-21 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the last two centuries BCE, the Western Han capital of Chang'an, near today's Xi'an in northwest China, outshone Augustan Rome in several ways while administering comparable numbers of imperial subjects and equally vast territories. At its grandest, during the last fifty years or so before the collapse of the dynasty in 9 CE, Chang�an boasted imperial libraries with thousands of documents on bamboo and silk in a city nearly three times the size of Rome and nearly four times larger than Alexandria. Many reforms instituted in this capital in ate Western Han substantially shaped not only the institutions of the Eastern Han (25�220 CE) but also the rest of imperial China until 1911. Although thousands of studies document imperial Rome�s glory, until now no book-length work in a Western language has been devoted to Han Chang�an, the reign of Emperor Chengdi (whose accomplishments rival those of Augustus and Hadrian), or the city's impressive library project (26-6 BCE), which ultimately produced the first state-sponsored versions of many of the classics and masterworks that we hold in our hands today. Chang�an 26 BCE addresses this deficiency, using as a focal point the reign of Emperor Chengdi (r. 33�7 bce), specifically the year in which the imperial library project began. This in-depth survey by some of the world�s best scholars, Chinese and Western, explores the built environment, sociopolitical transformations, and leading figures of Chang�an, making a strong case for the revision of historical assumptions about the two Han dynasties. A multidisciplinary volume representing a wealth of scholarly perspectives, the book draws on the established historical record and recent archaeological discoveries of thousands of tombs, building foundations, and remnants of walls and gates from Chang�an and its surrounding area.
Download or read book Dreaming and Self Cultivation in China 300 BCE 800 CE written by Robert Ford Campany and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-09-09 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Practitioners of any of the paths of self-cultivation available in ancient and medieval China engaged daily in practices meant to bring their bodies and minds under firm control. They took on regimens to discipline their comportment, speech, breathing, diet, senses, desires, sexuality, even their dreams. Yet, compared with waking life, dreams are incongruous, unpredictable—in a word, strange. How, then, did these regimes of self-fashioning grapple with dreaming, a lawless yet ubiquitous domain of individual experience? In Dreaming and Self-Cultivation in China, 300 BCE–800 CE, Robert Ford Campany examines how dreaming was addressed in texts produced and circulated by practitioners of Daoist, Buddhist, Confucian, and other self-cultivational disciplines. Working through a wide range of scriptures, essays, treatises, biographies, commentaries, fictive dialogues, diary records, interpretive keys, and ritual instructions, Campany uncovers a set of discrete paradigms by which dreams were viewed and responded to by practitioners. He shows how these paradigms underlay texts of diverse religious and ideological persuasions that are usually treated in mutual isolation. The result is a provocative meditation on the relationship between individuals’ nocturnal experiences and one culture’s persistent attempts to discipline, interpret, and incorporate them into waking practice.
Download or read book Xun Xu and the Politics of Precision in Third Century AD China written by Howard L. Goodman and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-02-25 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This biography of the court scholar Xun Xu explores central areas of intellectual life in third-century China — court lyrics, music, metrology, pitch systems, archeology, and historiography. It clarifies the relevant source texts in order to reveal fierce debates. Besides solving technical puzzles about the material details of court rites, the book unfolds factional struggles that developed into scholarly ones. Xun’s opponents were major figures like Zhang Hua and Zhi Yu. Xun Xu’s overall approach to antiquity and the derivation of truth made appeals to an idealized Zhou for authority. Ultimately, Xun’s precision and methods cost him both reputation and court status. The events mark a turning point in which ideals were moving away from such court constructs toward a relatively more philosophical antiquarianism and towards new terms and genres of self-expression.
Download or read book Handbook for Asian Studies Specialists written by Noriko Asato and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An indispensable tool for librarians who do reference or collection management, this work is a pioneering offering of expertly selected print and electronic reference tools for East Asian Studies (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean). Handbook for Asian Studies Specialists: A Guide to Research Materials and Collection Building Tools is the first work to cover reference works for the main Asian area languages of China, Japan, and Korea. Several leading Asian Studies librarians have contributed their many decades of experience to create a resource that gathers major reference titles—both print and online—that would be useful to today's Asian Studies librarian. Organized by language group, it offers useful information on the many subscription-based and open-source electronic tools relevant to Asian Studies. This book will serve as an essential resource for reference collections at academic libraries. Previously published bibliographies on materials deal with China or Japan or Korea, but none have coalesced information on all three countries into one work, or are written in English. And unlike the other resources available, this work provides the insight needed for librarians to make informed collection management decisions and reference selections.
Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Early Chinese History written by Paul R. Goldin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 726 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of early China has been radically transformed over the past fifty years by archaeological discoveries, including both textual and non-textual artefacts. Excavations of settlements and tombs have demonstrated that most people did not lead their lives in accordance with ritual canons, while previously unknown documents have shown that most received histories were written retrospectively by victors and present a correspondingly anachronistic perspective. This handbook provides an authoritative survey of the major periods of Chinese history from the Neolithic era to the fall of the Latter Han Empire and the end of antiquity (AD 220). It is the first volume to include not only a comprehensive review of political history but also detailed treatments of topics that transcend particular historical periods, such as: Warfare and political thought Cities and agriculture Language and art Medicine and mathematics Providing a detailed analysis of the most up-to-date research by leading scholars in the field of early Chinese history, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Chinese history, Asian archaeology, and Chinese studies in general.
