Download or read book Sources of Western Zhou History written by Edward L. Shaughnessy and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1992-01-08 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thousands of ritual bronze vessels discovered by China's archaeologists serve as the major documentary source for the Western Zhou dynasty (1045-771 B.C.). These vessels contain long inscriptions full of detail on subjects as diverse as the military history of the period, the bureaucratic structure of the royal court, and lawsuits among the gentry. Moreover, being cast in bronze, the inscriptions preserve exactly the contemporary script and language. Shaughnessy has written a meticulous and detailed work on the historiography and interpretation of these objects. By demonstrating how the inscriptions are read and interpreted, Shaughnessy makes accessible in English some of the most important evidence about life in ancient China.
Download or read book California s Salmon and Steelhead written by Alan Lufkin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-08-19 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Millions upon millions of salmon and steelhead once filled California streams, providing a plentiful and sustainable food resource for the original peoples of the region. But over the years, dams and irrigation diversions have reduced natural spawning habitat from an estimated 6,000 miles to fewer than 300. River pollution has also hit hard at fish populations, which within recent decades have diminished by 80 percent. One species, the San Joaquin River spring chinook, became extinct soon after World War II. Other species are nearly extinct. This volume documents the reasons for the decline; it also offers practical suggestions about how the decline might be reversed. The California salmon story is presented here in human perspective: its broad historical, economic, cultural, and political facets, as well as the biological, are all treated. No comparable work has ever been published, although some of the material has been available for half a century. In the richly varied contributions in this volume, the reader meets Indians whose history is tied to the history of the salmon and steelhead upon which they depend; commercial trollers who see their livelihood and unique lifestyle vanishing; biologists and fishery managers alarmed at the loss of river water habitable by fish and at the effects of hatcheries on native gene pools. Women who fish, conservation-minded citizens, foresters, economists, outdoor writers, engineers, politicians, city youth restoring streambeds—all are represented. Their lives—and the lives of all Californians—are affected in myriad ways by the fate of California's salmon and steelhead. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.
Download or read book Imprints of Kinship written by Edward L. Shaughnessy and published by The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. This book was released on 2017-03-15 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent discoveries of bronze ritual vessels from ancient China provide the ground for this collection of essays, which focus in particular on the nature and patterns of family lineages as seen from these artifacts found in tombs throughout north China. Based on careful readings of the inscriptions on the bronze vessels, the editor and his eight contributors reconstruct the genealogies, kinship structures, political identities, and relationship networks of leading families and individuals from BronzeAge China. The rich scholarship also contributes to our understanding of the archaeology, chronology, warfare, and legal structures of ancient China. "The bronze inscriptions from ancient China are far too important to be left to the specialized archaeologists alone. Professor Shaughnessy and his group of leading practitioners of the arcane art of teasing out the meaning implicit and explicit in these extraordinarily difficult--often only recently discovered--inscriptions allow us to look over their shoulders as they struggle valiantly with some of the richest sources from the earliest stages of Chinese intellectual ethnography and literary culture. This volume provides the kind of handson and welldocumented exploratory philology that opens up a wide field of general discussion concerning an early formative stage of Chinese civilization." --Christoph Harbsmeier, Professor Emeritus of Chinese, University of Oslo
Download or read book Social Memory and State Formation in Early China written by Min Li and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 587 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thought-provoking book on the archaeology of power, knowledge, social memory, and the emergence of classical tradition in early China.
Download or read book Sources of Western Chou Zhou History written by Edward L. Shaughnessy and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Kingship Ritual and Royal Ideology in Western Zhou China written by Paul Nicholas Vogt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-10 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In accounts of Chinese history, the Western Zhou period has been lionized as a golden age of ritual, when kings created the ceremonies that underlay the traditions of imperial governance. In this book, Paul Nicholas Vogt rediscovers their roots in the vagaries of Western Zhou royal geopolitics through an investigation of inscriptions on bronze vessels, the best contemporary source for this period. He shows how the kings of the Western Zhou adapted ritual to create and retain power, while introducing changes that affected later remembrances of Zhou royal ritual and that shaped the tradition of statecraft throughout Chinese history. Using ritual and social theory to explain Western Zhou history, Vogt traces how the traditions of pre-modern China were born, how a ruling dynasty establishes and holds on to power, how religion and politics can support and restrain each other, and how ancient peoples made, used, and assigned meaning to art and artifacts.
Download or read book Bureaucracy and the State in Early China written by Feng Li and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-11 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ook redefines the bureaucracy of Ancient Chinese society during the Western Zhou period. The analysis is based on inscriptions of royal edicts from the period carved into bronze vessels. The inscriptions clarify the political and social construction of the Western Zhou and the ways in which it exercised its authority.
Download or read book Early China written by Li Feng and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-30 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical new interpretation of the early history of Chinese civilization based on the most recent scholarship and archaeological discoveries.
Download or read book Landscape and Power in Early China written by Li Feng and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-08-17 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ascendancy of the Western Zhou in Bronze Age China, 1045–771 BC, was a critical period in the development of Chinese civilisation and culture. This book addresses the complex relationship between geography and political power in the context of the crisis and fall of the Western Zhou state. Drawing on the latest archaeological discoveries, the book shows how inscribed bronze vessels can be used to reveal changes in the political space of the period and explores literary and geographical evidence to produce a coherent understanding of the Bronze Age past. By taking an interdisciplinary approach which embraces archaeology, history and geography, the book thoroughly reinterprets late Western Zhou history and probes the causes of its gradual decline and eventual fall. Supported throughout by maps created from the GIS datasets and by numerous on-site photographs, Landscape and Power in Early China gives significant insights into this important Bronze Age society.
Download or read book Before Confucius written by Edward L. Shaughnessy and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the original composition of China's oldest books, the Classic of Changes, the Venerated Documents, and the Classic of Poetry, and attempts to restore their original meanings.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Early China written by Elizabeth Childs-Johnson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-23 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook on Early China brings 30 scholars together to cover early China from the Neolithic through Warring States periods (ca 5000-500BCE). The study is chronological and incorporates a multidisciplinary approach, covering topics from archaeology, anthropology, art history, architecture, music, and metallurgy, to literature, religion, paleography, cosmology, religion, prehistory, and history.
Download or read book Zhou History Unearthed the Bamboo Manuscript Xinian and Early Chinese Historiography written by Yuri Pines and published by . This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zhou History Unearthed offers both a novel understanding of early Chinese historiography and a fully annotated translation of Xinian (String of Years), the most notable historical manuscript from the state of Chu. Yuri Pines details the importance of Xinian and other recently discovered texts for our understanding of history writing in Zhou China.
Download or read book Early Chinese Religion Part One Shang Through Han 1250 BC 220 AD 2 Vols written by John Lagerwey and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-12-24 with total page 1281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Together, and for the first time in any language, the 24 essays gathered in these volumes provide a composite picture of the history of religion in ancient China from the emergence of writing ca. 1250 BC to the collapse of the first major imperial dynasty in 220 AD. It is a multi-faceted tale of changing gods and rituals that includes the emergence of a form of “secular humanism” that doubts the existence of the gods and the efficacy of ritual and of an imperial orthodoxy that founds its legitimacy on a distinction between licit and illicit sacrifices. Written by specialists in a variety of disciplines, the essays cover such subjects as divination and cosmology, exorcism and medicine, ethics and self-cultivation, mythology, taboos, sacrifice, shamanism, burial practices, iconography, and political philosophy. Produced under the aegis of the Centre de recherche sur les civilisations chinoise, japonaise et tibétaine (UMR 8155) and the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris).
Download or read book China in the Early Bronze Age written by Robert L. Thorp and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-03-25 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the great breakthroughs in Chinese studies in the early twentieth century was the archaeological identification of the earliest, fully historical dynasty of kings, the Shang (ca. 1300-1050 B.C.E.). The last fifty years have seen major advances in all areas of Chinese archaeology, but recent studies of the Shang, their ancestors, and their contemporaries have been especially rich. Since the last English-language overview of Shang civilization appeared in 1980, the pace of discovery has quickened. China in the Early Bronze Age: Shang Civilization is the first work in twenty-five years to synthesize current knowledge of the Shang for everyone interested in the origins of Chinese civilization. China in the Early Bronze Age traces the development of early Bronze Age cultures in North and Northwestern China from about 2000 B.C.E., including the Erlitou culture (often identified with the Xia) and the Erligang culture. Robert L. Thorp introduces major sites, their architectural remains, burials, and material culture, with special attention to jades and bronze. He reviews the many discoveries near Anyang, site of two capitals of the Shang kings. In addition to the topography of these sites, Thorp discusses elite crafts and devotes a chapter to the Shang cult, its divination practices, and its rituals. The volume concludes with a survey of the late Shang world, cultures contemporary with Anyang during the late second millennium B.C.E. Fully documented with references to Chinese archaeological sources and illustrated with more than one hundred line drawings, China in the Early Bronze Age also includes informative sidebars on related topics and suggested readings. Students of the history and archaeology of early civilizations will find China in the Early Bronze Age the most up-to-date and wide-ranging introduction to its topic now in print. Scholars in Chinese studies will use this work as a handbook and research guide. This volume makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in the formative stages of Chinese culture.
Download or read book New Sources of Early Chinese History written by Edward L. Shaughnessy and published by Institute of East Asian Studies University of California - B. This book was released on 1997 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ancient Chinese Warfare written by Ralph D. Sawyer and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of China is a history of warfare. Rarely in its 3,000-year existence has the country not been beset by war, rebellion, or raids. Warfare was a primary source of innovation, social evolution, and material progress in the Legendary Era, Hsia dynasty, and Shang dynasty -- indeed, war was the force that formed the first cohesive Chinese empire, setting China on a trajectory of state building and aggressive activity that continues to this day. In Ancient Chinese Warfare, a preeminent expert on Chinese military history uses recently recovered documents and archaeological findings to construct a comprehensive guide to the developing technologies, strategies, and logistics of ancient Chinese militarism. The result is a definitive look at the tools and methods that won wars and shaped culture in ancient China.
Download or read book China Marches West written by Peter C Perdue and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 748 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From about 1600 to 1800, the Qing empire of China expanded to unprecedented size. Through astute diplomacy, economic investment, and a series of ambitious military campaigns into the heart of Central Eurasia, the Manchu rulers defeated the Zunghar Mongols, and brought all of modern Xinjiang and Mongolia under their control, while gaining dominant influence in Tibet. The China we know is a product of these vast conquests. Peter C. Perdue chronicles this little-known story of China's expansion into the northwestern frontier. Unlike previous Chinese dynasties, the Qing achieved lasting domination over the eastern half of the Eurasian continent. Rulers used forcible repression when faced with resistance, but also aimed to win over subject peoples by peaceful means. They invested heavily in the economic and administrative development of the frontier, promoted trade networks, and adapted ceremonies to the distinct regional cultures. Perdue thus illuminates how China came to rule Central Eurasia and how it justifies that control, what holds the Chinese nation together, and how its relations with the Islamic world and Mongolia developed. He offers valuable comparisons to other colonial empires and discusses the legacy left by China's frontier expansion. The Beijing government today faces unrest on its frontiers from peoples who reject its autocratic rule. At the same time, China has launched an ambitious development program in its interior that in many ways echoes the old Qing policies. China Marches West is a tour de force that will fundamentally alter the way we understand Central Eurasia.
