Download or read book The Social Life of Inkstones written by Dorothy Ko and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2017-05-01 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inkstone, a piece of polished stone no bigger than an outstretched hand, is an instrument for grinding ink, an object of art, a token of exchange between friends or sovereign states, and a surface on which texts and images are carved. As such, the inkstone has been entangled with elite masculinity and the values of wen (culture, literature, civility) in China, Korea, and Japan for more than a millennium. However, for such a ubiquitous object in East Asia, it is virtually unknown in the Western world. Examining imperial workshops in the Forbidden City, the Duan quarries in Guangdong, the commercial workshops in Suzhou, and collectors� homes in Fujian, The Social Life of Inkstones traces inkstones between court and society and shows how collaboration between craftsmen and scholars created a new social order in which the traditional hierarchy of �head over hand� no longer predominated. Dorothy Ko also highlights the craftswoman Gu Erniang, through whose work the artistry of inkstone-making achieved unprecedented refinement between the 1680s and 1730s. The Social Life of Inkstones explores the hidden history and cultural significance of the inkstone and puts the stonecutters and artisans on center stage.
Download or read book The Social Life of Ink written by Ted Bishop and published by Penguin Canada. This book was released on 2014-10-28 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rich and imaginative discovery of how ink has shaped culture and why it is here to stay Ink is so much a part of daily life that we take it for granted, yet its invention was as significant as the wheel. Ink not only recorded culture, it bought political power, divided peoples, and led to murderous rivalries. Ancient letters on a page were revered as divine light, and precious ink recipes were held secret for centuries. And, when it first hit markets not so long ago, the excitement over the disposable ballpoint pen equalled that for a new smartphone—with similar complaints to the manufacturers. Curious about its impact on culture, literature, and the course of history, Ted Bishop sets out to explore the story of ink. From Budapest to Buenos Aires, he traces the lives of the innovators who created the ballpoint pen—revolutionary technology that still requires exact engineering today. Bishop visits a ranch in Utah to meet a master ink-maker who relishes igniting linseed oil to make traditional printers’ ink. In China, he learns that ink can be an exquisite object, the subject of poetry, and a means of strengthening (or straining) family bonds. And in the Middle East, he sees the world’s oldest Qur’an, stained with the blood of the caliph who was assassinated while reading it. An inquisitive and personal tour around the world, The Social Life of Ink asks us to look more closely at something we see so often that we don’t see it at all.
Download or read book The Social Life of Art written by Peter Stupples and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-11-10 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines not only the objects and processes that make up the artworlds of human history, but also the social and cultural circumstances, the historicised contexts that bring about their making, frame their functioning, inform their properties and influence their effects, both at the time of their creation and throughout their subsequent biographies. In the short span that “art” has played a part in human life, one may conceive of time as a social river, with a strong current towards the capricious mainstream, and eddies and quiet pools near the banks. The current will flow faster in spate and slower in drought. But it will be forever in motion. It will be unpredictable. Nothing will stop its inexorable force. Art runs in that social river, subject to the flow and chance of time.
Download or read book The Inscription of Things written by Thomas Kelly and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-14 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why would an inkstone have a poem inscribed on it? Early modern Chinese writers did not limit themselves to working with brushes and ink, and their texts were not confined to woodblock-printed books or the boundaries of the paper page. Poets carved lines of verse onto cups, ladles, animal horns, seashells, walking sticks, boxes, fans, daggers, teapots, and musical instruments. Calligraphers left messages on the implements ordinarily used for writing on paper. These inscriptions—terse compositions in verse or epigrammatic prose—relate in complex ways to the objects on which they are written. Thomas Kelly develops a new account of the relationship between Chinese literature and material culture by examining inscribed objects from the late Ming and early to mid-Qing dynasties. He considers how the literary qualities of inscriptions interact with the visual and physical properties of the things that bear them. Kelly argues that inscribing an object became a means for authors to grapple with the materiality and technologies of writing. Facing profound social upheavals, from volatility in the marketplace to the violence of dynastic transition, writers turned to inscriptions to reflect on their investments in and dependence on the permanence of the written word. Shedding new light on cultures of writing in early modern China, The Inscription of Things broadens understandings of the links between the literary and the material.
Download or read book Know Your Remedies written by He Bian and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Traditional Chinese medicine has been practiced in various forms for more than a thousand years. Practitioners may heal patients with herbal remedies, acupuncture, massage, exercise, and modified diets. Even today, herbal medicines are of particular importance; Chinese pharmacies containing a vast array of remedies can be found in cities and towns the world over. This book is an interdisciplinary and cultural history of the concept of "pharmacy," both the drugs themselves and the trade in medicine, during the Ming and Qing dynasties of early modern China. This was a time of change for traditional Chinese medicine and for Chinese science as a whole. Many historians have argued that sixteenth-century China was a high point of scientific inquiry, followed by a period of intellectual decline. Though political and intellectual shifts led to a crisis of authority over pharmaceutical knowledge in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, Bian argues that this period of supposed intellectual decline was in fact characterized by numerous efforts to further refine and spread the pharmacological knowledge amassed in the Ming dynasty. She draws on a wide range of primary sources, but particularly through the study of bencao (pronounced "pen ts'ao"), a genre of encyclopaedic works, often called matteria medica or pharmacopoeia in the West, that collect information on medicinal substances. As the early modern Chinese Empire expanded and print culture became more widespread, the pursuit of medical remedies became a significant commercial enterprise. The author connects theory and practice of pharmacy during the Ming and Qing dynasties to broader developments in intellectual history, book culture, commerce, and taxation"--
Download or read book Perspective Selected Essays on Space in Art and Design written by Sarina Miller and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2023-09-12 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Perspective: Selected Essays on Space in Art and Design' explores the ways in which visual and physical space have been designed and experienced in different cultures. This book amplifies the significance of space as a design element by examining its implications in various contexts through a global perspective of art and design.
Download or read book A Fashionable Century written by Rachel Silberstein and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clothing and accessories from nineteenth-century China reveal much about women’s participation in the commercialization of textile handicrafts and the flourishing of urban popular culture. Focusing on women’s work and fashion, A Fashionable Century presents an array of visually compelling clothing and accessories neglected by traditional histories of Chinese dress, examining these products’ potential to illuminate issues of gender and identity. In the late Qing, the expansion of production systems and market economies transformed the Chinese fashion system, widening access to fashionable techniques, materials, and imagery. Challenging the conventional production model, in which women embroidered items at home, Silberstein sets fashion within a process of commercialization that created networks of urban guilds, commercial workshops, and subcontracted female workers. These networks gave rise to new trends influenced by performance and prints, and they offered women opportunities to participate in fashion and contribute to local economies and cultures. Rachel Silberstein draws on vernacular and commercial sources, rather than on the official and imperial texts prevalent in Chinese dress history, to demonstrate that in these fascinating objects—regulated by market desires, rather than imperial edict—fashion formed at the intersection of commerce and culture. A Fashionable Century is the winner of the Costume Society of America's Millia Davenport Publication Award and was long-listed for the Textile Society of America's R. L. Shep Award. The judges described the book as "an extraordinary achievement in scholarship working with source materials that are little-known outside of China and not otherwise available in English."
Download or read book Centring the Periphery New Perspectives on Collecting East Asian Objects written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-08-21 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Centring the Periphery: New Perspectives on Collecting East Asian Objects, edited by Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik, explores East Asian collections in "peripheral" areas of Europe and North America and their relationship with the East Asian collections in former imperial and colonial centres. The authors not only present the stories of a number of less well-known individual objects and collections, but also discuss the evolution of fashions and tastes in East Asian objects in areas that were not centres of European colonial power, and the socioeconomic conditions in which they were collected. To date, research on the collecting of East Asian objects in the Euro-American region has focused primarily on larger collections and collectors. The stories from the periphery, however, deserve to be told. They point to important departures from the dominant discourses and practices of East Asian collecting, thus raising questions about established taxonomies and knowledge systems. With contributions by Tina Berdajs, Chou Wei-Chiang, Györgyi Fajcsák, Jin Han, Sarah Laursen, Beatrix Mecsi, Motoh Helena, Stacey Pierson, Maria Sobotka, Filip Suchomel, Barbara Trnovec, Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik, Brigid Vance, Maja Veselič, Nataša Visočnik Gerželj, Bettina Zorn.
Download or read book Opportunity in Crisis written by Steven B. Miles and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-03-07 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opportunity in Crisis explores the history of late Qing Cantonese migration along the West River basin during war and reconstruction and the impact of those developments on the relationship between state and local elites on the Guangxi frontier. By situating Cantonese upriver and overseas migration within the same framework, Steven Miles reconceives the late Qing as an age of Cantonese diasporic expansion rather than one of state decline. The book opens with crisis: rising levels of violence targeting Cantonese riverine commerce, much of it fomented by a geographically mobile Cantonese underclass. Miles then narrates the ensuing history of a Cantonese rebel regime established in Guangxi in the wake of the Taiping uprising. Subsequent chapters discuss opportunities created by this crisis and its aftermath and demonstrate important continuities and changes across the mid-century divide. With the reassertion of Qing control, Cantonese commercial networks in Guangxi expanded dramatically and became an increasingly important source of state revenue. Through its reliance on Hunanese and Cantonese to reconquer Guangxi, the Qing state allowed these diasporic cohorts more flexibility in colonizing the provincial administration and examination apparatus, helping to recreate a single polity on the eve of China’s transition from empire to nation-state.
Download or read book Laws of the Land written by Tristan G. Brown and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-05 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking history of fengshui’s roles in public life and law during China’s last imperial dynasty Today the term fengshui, which literally means “wind and water,” is recognized around the world. Yet few know exactly what it means, let alone its fascinating history. In Laws of the Land, Tristan Brown tells the story of the important roles—especially legal ones—played by fengshui in Chinese society during China’s last imperial dynasty, the Manchu Qing (1644–1912). Employing archives from Mainland China and Taiwan that have only recently become available, this is the first book to document fengshui’s invocations in Chinese law during the Qing dynasty. Facing a growing population, dwindling natural resources, and an overburdened rural government, judicial administrators across China grappled with disputes and petitions about fengshui in their efforts to sustain forestry, farming, mining, and city planning. Laws of the Land offers a radically new interpretation of these legal arrangements: they worked. An intelligent, considered, and sustained engagement with fengshui on the ground helped the imperial state keep the peace and maintain its legitimacy, especially during the increasingly turbulent decades of the nineteenth century. As the century came to an end, contentious debates over industrialization swept across the bureaucracy, with fengshui invoked by officials and scholars opposed to the establishment of railways, telegraphs, and foreign-owned mines. Demonstrating that the only way to understand those debates and their profound stakes is to grasp fengshui’s longstanding roles in Chinese public life, Laws of the Land rethinks key issues in the history of Chinese law, politics, science, religion, and economics.
Download or read book Forging the Golden Urn written by Max Oidtmann and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-31 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1995, the People’s Republic of China resurrected a Qing-era law mandating that the reincarnations of prominent Tibetan Buddhist monks be identified by drawing lots from a golden urn. The Chinese Communist Party hoped to limit the ability of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile to independently identify reincarnations. In so doing, they elevated a long-forgotten ceremony into a controversial symbol of Chinese sovereignty in Tibet. In Forging the Golden Urn, Max Oidtmann ventures into the polyglot world of the Qing empire in search of the origins of the golden urn tradition. He seeks to understand the relationship between the Qing state and its most powerful partner in Inner Asia—the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism. Why did the Qianlong emperor invent the golden urn lottery in 1792? What ability did the Qing state have to alter Tibetan religious and political traditions? What did this law mean to Qing rulers, their advisors, and Tibetan Buddhists? Working with both the Manchu-language archives of the empire’s colonial bureaucracy and the chronicles of Tibetan elites, Oidtmann traces how a Chinese bureaucratic technology—a lottery for assigning administrative posts—was exported to the Tibetan and Mongolian regions of the Qing empire and transformed into a ritual for identifying and authenticating reincarnations. Forging the Golden Urn sheds new light on how the empire’s frontier officers grappled with matters of sovereignty, faith, and law and reveals the role that Tibetan elites played in the production of new religious traditions in the context of Qing rule.
Download or read book Electrified Voices written by Kerim Yasar and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-23 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long before karaoke’s ubiquity and the rise of global brands such as Sony, Japan was a place where new audio technologies found eager users and contributed to new cultural forms. In Electrified Voices, Kerim Yasar traces the origins of the modern soundscape, showing how the revolutionary nature of sound technology and the rise of a new auditory culture played an essential role in the formation of Japanese modernity. A far-reaching cultural history of the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, radio, and early sound film in Japan, Electrified Voices shows how these technologies reshaped the production of culture. Audio technologies upended the status of the written word as the only source of prestige while revivifying traditional forms of orality. The ability to reproduce and transmit sound, freeing it from the constraints of time and space, had profound consequences on late nineteenth-century language reform; twentieth-century literary, musical, and cinematic practices; the rise of militarism and nationalism in the 1920s and 30s; and the transition to the postwar period inaugurated by Emperor Hirohito’s declaration of unconditional surrender to Allied forces—a declaration that was recorded on a gramophone record and broadcast throughout the defeated Japanese empire. The first cultural history in English of auditory technologies in modern Japan, Electrified Voices enriches our understanding of Japanese modernity and offers a major contribution to sound studies and global media history.
Download or read book The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism written by Sidney Xu Lu and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows how Japanese anxiety about overpopulation was used to justify expansion, blurring lines between migration and settler colonialism. This title is also available as Open Access.
Download or read book Networks of Touch written by Michael J. Hatch and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mass Vaccination written by Mary Augusta Brazelton and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the eradication of smallpox has long been documented, not many know the Chinese roots of this historic achievement. In this revelatory study, Mary Augusta Brazelton examines the PRC's public health campaigns of the 1950s to explain just how China managed to inoculate almost six hundred million people against this and other deadly diseases. Mass Vaccination tells the story of the people, materials, and systems that built these campaigns, exposing how, by improving the nation's health, the Chinese Communist Party quickly asserted itself in the daily lives of all citizens. This crusade had deep roots in the Republic of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War, when researchers in China's southwest struggled to immunize as many people as possible, both in urban and rural areas. But its legacy was profound, providing a means for the state to develop new forms of control and of engagement. Brazelton considers the implications of vaccination policies for national governance, from rural health care to Cold War-era programs of medical diplomacy. By embedding Chinese medical history within international currents, she highlights how and why China became an exemplar of primary health care at a crucial moment in global health policy.
Download or read book Japan s Imperial Underworlds written by David R. Ambaras and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-09 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major new study uses vivid accounts of encounters between Chinese and Japanese people living at the margins of empire to elucidate Sino-Japanese relations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each chapter explores mobility in East Asia through the histories of often ignored categories of people, including trafficked children, peddlers, 'abducted' women and a female pirate. These stories reveal the shared experiences of the border populations of Japan and China and show how they fundamentally shaped the territorial boundaries that defined Japan's imperial world and continue to inform present-day views of China. From Meiji-era treaty ports to the Taiwan Strait, South China, and French Indochina, the movements of people in marginal locations not only destabilized the state's policing of geographical borders and social boundaries, but also stimulated fantasies of furthering imperial power.
Download or read book China s Conservative Revolution written by Brian Tsui and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this ambitious examination of the complex political culture of China under Guomindang rule, Brian Tsui interweaves political ideologies, intellectual trends, social movements and diplomatic maneuvers to demonstrate how the Chinese revolution became conservative after the anti-Communist coup of 1927. Dismissing violent struggles for class equality as incompatible with nationalist goals, Chiang Kai-shek's government should, Tsui argues, be understood in the context of the global ascendance of radical right-wing movements during the inter-war period. The Guomindang's revolutionary nation-building and modernization project struck a chord with China's reformist liberal elite, who were wary of mob rule, while its obsession with Eastern spirituality appealed to Indian nationalists fighting Western colonialism. The Nationalist vision was defined by the party-state's hostility to communist challenges as much as by its ability to co-opt liberalism and Pan-Asianist anti-colonialism. Tsui's revisionist reading revisits the peculiarities of the Guomindang's revolutionary enterprise, resituating Nationalist China in the moment of global radical right ascendancy.
