The Northern Song (960–1126) was one of the most transformative periods in Chinese literary history, characterized by the emergence of printing and an ensuing proliferation of books. The poet Huang ...Tingjian (1045–1105), writing at the height of this period, both defined and was defined by these changes. The first focused study on the cultural consequences of printing in Northern Song China, this book examines how the nascent print culture shaped the poetic theory and practice of Huang Tingjian and the Jiangxi School of Poetry he founded. Author Yugen Wang argues that at the core of Huang and the Jiangxi School’s search for poetic methods was their desire to find a new way of reading and writing that could effectively address the changed literary landscape of the eleventh century. Wang chronicles the historical and cultural negotiation Huang and his colleagues were conducting as they responded to the new book culture, and opens new ground for investigating the literary interpretive and hermeneutical effects of printing. This book should be of interest not only to scholars and readers of classical Chinese poetry but to anyone concerned with how the material interacts with the intellectual and how technology has influenced our conception and practice of reading and writing throughout history.
Drawing on largely local sources, including local gazetteers and literati inscriptions for religious sites, this book offers a comprehensive examination of what it means to be 'local' during the ...Southern Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties in Ji'an prefecture (Jiangxi). It argues that 'belonging locally' was important to Ji'an literati throughout this period. How they achieved that, however, changed significantly. Southern Song and Yuan literati wrote about religious sites from within their local communities, but their early Ming counterparts wrote about local temples from their posts at the capital, seeking to transform local sites from a distance. By the late Ming, temples had been superseded by other sites of local activism, including community compacts, lineage prefaces, and community covenants.
Top Graduate Zhang Xie is the first extant play in the Chinese southern dramatic tradition and a milestone in the history of Chinese literature. Dating from the early fifteenth century, but possibly ...composed earlier, it relates the story of a talented scholar who sets off for the capital to take the imperial exams.
Shao-yun Yang challenges assumptions that the cultural and socioeconomic watershed of the Tang-Song transition (800-1127 CE) was marked by a xenophobic or nationalist hardening of ethnocultural ...boundaries in response to growing foreign threats. In that period, reinterpretations of Chineseness and its supposed antithesis, "barbarism," were not straightforward products of political change but had their own developmental logic based in two interrelated intellectual shifts among the literati elite: the emergence of Confucian ideological and intellectual orthodoxy and the rise of neo-Confucian (daoxue) philosophy. New discourses emphasized the fluidity of the Chinese-barbarian dichotomy, subverting the centrality of cultural or ritual practices to Chinese identity and redefining the essence of Chinese civilization and its purported superiority. The key issues at stake concerned the acceptability of intellectual pluralism in a Chinese society and the importance of Confucian moral values to the integrity and continuity of the Chinese state. Through close reading of the contexts and changing geopolitical realities in which new interpretations of identity emerged, this intellectual history engages with ongoing debates over relevance of the concepts of culture, nation, and ethnicity to premodern China.
China was the most advanced country in the world when Huizong ascended the throne in 1100 CE. Artistically gifted, he guided the Song Dynasty toward cultural greatness but is known to posterity as a ...political failure who lost the throne to Jurchen invaders and died their prisoner. In this comprehensive biography, Patricia Ebrey corrects the prevailing view of Huizong as decadent and negligent, recasting him as a ruler ambitious in pursuing glory for his flourishing realm. After a rocky start trying to overcome political animosities at court, Huizong turned his attention to the good he could do. He greatly expanded the court's charitable ventures, founding schools, hospitals, orphanages, and paupers' cemeteries. Surrounding himself with poets, painters, and musicians, he built palaces, temples, and gardens of unsurpassed splendor. Often overlooked, however, is the importance of Daoism in Huizong's life. He treated spiritual masters with great deference, wrote scriptural commentaries, and urged his subjects to adopt his beliefs and practices. This devotion to the Daoist vision of sacred kingship eventually alienated the Confucian mainstream and compromised Huizong's ability to govern. Ebrey's lively biography adds new dimensions of understanding to a passionate, paradoxical ruler who, many centuries later, inspires both admiration and disapproval.
Salt and State Chien, Cecilia Lee-fang
2020, 2004., Letnik:
99
eBook
Odprti dostop
Salt and State is an annotated translation of a treatise on salt from Song China. From its inception in the Han dynasty (206 B.C.–220 A.D.), the salt monopoly was a key component in the Chinese ...government's financial toolkit. Salt, with its highly localized and large-scale production, was an ideal target for bureaucratic management. In the Song dynasty (960–1279), fiscal pressures on the government had intensified with increased centralization and bureaucratization. A bloated administration and an enormous standing army maintained against incursions by aggressive steppe neighbors placed tremendous strain on Song finances. Developing the salt monopoly seemed a logical and indeed urgent strategy, but each actor in this plan—the emperor, local officials, monopoly administrators, producers, merchants, and consumers—had his own interests to protect and advance. Thus attempts to maximize the effectiveness of the monopoly meant frequent policy swings and led to levels of corruption that would ultimately undo the Song. Unlike other contemporary sources, the Songshi treatise organizes its subject into an intelligible and detailed narrative, elucidating special terminology, the bureaucracy and its processes, and debates relating to Chinese finance and politics, as well as the salt industry itself. Professor Chien's extensive annotation relies on parallel histories that corroborate and supplement the Songshi account, together providing a comprehensive study of this important institution in China's premodern political economy.
Lovely West Lake, near scenic Hangzhou on China's east coast, has been celebrated as a major tourist site since the twelfth century. Now as then, visitors boat to its islands, stroll through its ...gardens, worship in its temples, and immortalize it in poetry and painting. Hangzhou and West Lake have long served as icons of Chinese landscape appreciation, literary and artistic expression, and tourism. In the first in-depth English-language study of this picturesque locale, Xiaolin Duan examines the interplay between human enterprise and the natural environment during the Song dynasty (960-1279). After the Song lost north China to the Jurchens and the imperial court fled south, a new capital was established at Hangzhou, making the area the national political and cultural center. West Lake became a model for idealized nature, fashioned by the diverse activities of its visitors. Duan shows how engagements in, on, and around West Lake influenced visitors' conceptualization of nature and sparked the emergence of the lake as a tourist destination, highlighting how the natural landscape played a role in shaping social and cultural constructs. Incorporating evidence from miscellanies, local and temple gazetteers, paintings, maps, poems, and anecdotes, The Rise of West Lake explores the complexity of the lake as an interactive site where ecological and economic concerns contended and where spiritual pursuits overlapped with aesthetic ones.
Empowered by Ancestors: Controversy over the Imperial Temple in Song China (960–1279) examines the enduring tension between cultural authority and political power in imperial China by inquiring into ...Song ritual debates over the Imperial Temple. During these debates, Song-educated elites utilized various discourses to rectify temple rituals in their own ways. In this process, political interests were less emphasized and even detached from ritual discussions. Meanwhile, Song scholars of particular schools developed various ritual theories that were used to reshape society in later periods. Hence, the Song ritual debates exemplified the great transmission of ancestral ritual norms from the top stratum of imperial court downward to society. In this book, the author attempts to provide a lens through which historians, anthropologists, experts in Chinese Classics, and scholars from other disciplines can explore Chinese ritual in its intellectual, social, and political forms.
Chinese Longquan celadon, a type of green-glazed ceramic, is one of the most famous branded and trade products, particularly during the 13th and 14th centuries. Its archaeological and historical ...materials possess multiple attributes with plentiful cultural information. The objective of the present book is to vivify these materials and provide a broader perspective and additional methodologies to review and gain a new and more profound understanding of Longquan celadon. The first part of this book focuses on elite Longquan celadon in China's Southern Song (1127-1278) and Yuan (1271-1368) periods. The second part focuses on elite Longquan celadon products as imports in medieval Japan. These products played a crucial role in shaping medieval Japanese culture.
In the eleventh century, the cities of the Song Empire (960-1279) emerged into writing. Literati in prior centuries had looked away from crowded streets, but literati in the eleventh century found ...beauty in towering buildings and busy harbors. Their purpose in writing the city was ideological. On the written page, they tried to establish a distinction that eluded them in the avenues and to discern an immanent pattern in the movement of people, goods, and money. By the end of the eleventh century, however, they recognized that they had failed in their efforts. They had lost the Way in the city. Urban Life and Intellectual Crisis in Middle-Period China, 800-1100 reveals the central place of urban life in the history of the eleventh century. Important developments in literary innovation and monetary policy, in canonical exegesis and civil engineering, in financial reform and public health, converge in this book as they converged in the city.
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