To develop materials suitable for aerospace applications, silicon nitride/boron nitride (Sisub.3Nsub.4/BN) fibrous monolithic ceramics with varying BN contents were prepared. Employing analytical ...techniques such as XRD and SEM, coupled with mechanical testing equipment, the influence of BN concentration on the thermal shock resistance of Sisub.3Nsub.4/BN fibrous monolithic ceramics was assessed. When the thermal shock differential is less than 800 °C, its residual flexural strength gradually decreases as the thermal shock differential increases. Conversely, when the differential exceeds 1000 °C, the residual flexural strength of the material increases. The residual strength of all samples reached its peak after undergoing a thermal shock assessment at a 1500 °C differential. When the BN mass fraction is 5 wt.%, the residual strength after a thermal shock at a temperature difference of 1500 °C is 387 ± 19 MPa, which is 124% higher than the original strength of the sample that did not undergo thermal shock (25 °C, 311 ± 18 MPa). The oxide layer formed on the thermal shock surface played a role in bridging defects introduced during material surface processing.
"Ink landscape painting is a distinctive feature of the Northern Song, and painters of this era produced some of the most celebrated artworks in Chinese history. The Efficacious Landscape addresses ...how landmark works of this pivotal period first came to be identified as potent symbols of imperial authority and later became objects through which exiled scholars expressed disaffection and dissent. In fulfilling these diverse roles, landscape demonstrated its efficacy in communicating through embodiment and in transcending the limitations of the concrete. Building on decades of monographic writings on Song painting, this carefully researched study presents a syncretic vision of how ink landscape evolved within the eleventh-century court community of artists, scholars, and aristocrats. Detailed visual analyses of surviving works and new insight about key landscapes by the court painter Guo Xi support the perspective put forward here and introduce original methodologies for interpreting painting as an integral element of political and cultural history. By focusing on the efforts of emperors, empresses, and eunuchs to cultivate ink landscape and its iconography, this investigation also tackles the social and class dichotomies that have long defined and frustrated existing scholarship on this period's paintings, highlighting instead the interconnectedness of painting practice's elite modalities.".
Xuanhe Catalogue of Paintings is the first complete translation of the well-known document produced at the court of Emperor Huizong (r. 1100–1125). Dated to 1120, the Catalogue is divided into ten ...categories of subject matter. Under Daoist and Buddhist Subjects, Figural Subjects, Architecture, Barbarian Tribes, Dragons and Fish, Landscape, Domestic and Wild Animals, Flowers and Birds, Ink Bamboo, and Vegetables and Fruit are biographies of 231 painters, ranging from famous early masters, such as Wu Daozi (ca. 685-758) and Li Cheng (919-967), to otherwise unknown artists of the Song-dynasty court, including fourteen eunuch officials and sixteen male and female members of the royal family. Titles of their pictures held in the palace collection are listed for each artist. These 6,396 paintings testify to the visual culture experienced by viewers of the twelfth century. The author's Introduction analyzes the Catalogue as a source of evidence about the formation of the Song-dynasty palace collection and argues that the majority of its pictures were already in the collection before Huizong's reign, as a result of conquest, confiscation, tribute, gift culture, collecting by earlier emperors, and the production of academy artists and regular officials at the Song court. Under Huizong's reign, around a thousand other pictures were added to the Catalogue through acquisition and reattribution.
Modeling the current distribution of and predicting suitable habitats for threatened species support the species conservation and restoration planning process. Therefore, the purpose of this study ...was to model the actual distribution and predict environmentally suitable habitats for Carex alatauensis S.R.Zhang 2015, a locally threatened native grass species on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. To realize this objective, based on the geographical samples within the natural distribution of C. alatauensis, the dominant climatic factors in its potential distribution range were analyzed using the maximum entropy (MaxEnt) model. The results showed that the average values of the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of the training data were 0.833 ± 0.044, which indicated that the accuracy of the MaxEnt model was pretty high for modeling potential distribution regions of C. alatauensis. The combined results from the Jackknife test and the presented contribution of environmental variables revealed that the annual precipitation, the growth season precipitation, and the precipitation of the driest month were the key climatic factors that restricted the distribution of C. alatauensis on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. It is predicted that the potential distribution area of C. alatauensis on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is 1.96 × 10sup.6 kmsup.2, and the most suitable area is 3.7 × 10sup.5 kmsup.2, mainly located in the Qilian Mountains, the Himalayas, and the Qingtanggula Mountains.
In Painting Architecture: Jiehua in Yuan China, 1271–1368, Leqi Yu has conducted comprehensive research on jiehua or ruled-line painting, a unique painting genre in fourteenth-century China. This ...genre relies on tools such as rulers to represent architectural details and structures accurately. Such technical consideration and mechanical perfection linked this painting category with the builder’s art, which led to Chinese elites’ belittlement and won Mongol patrons’ admiration. Yu suggests that painters in the Yuan dynasty made new efforts towards a unique modular system and an unsurpassable plain-drawing tradition. She argues that these two strategies made architectural paintings in the Yuan dynasty entirely different from their predecessors, as well as making the art form extremely difficult for subsequent painters to imitate.
The classic Chinese novel The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan) tells the story of a band of outlaws in twelfth-century China and their insurrection against the corrupt imperial court. Imported into Japan ...in the early seventeenth century, it became a ubiquitous source of inspiration for translations, adaptations, parodies, and illustrated woodblock prints. There is no work of Chinese fiction more important to both the development of early modern Japanese literature and the Japanese imagination of China thanThe Water Margin. In The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction, William C. Hedberg investigates the reception ofThe Water Margin in a variety of early modern and modern Japanese contexts, from eighteenth-century Confucian scholarship and literary exegesis to early twentieth-century colonial ethnography. He examines the ways Japanese interest in Chinese texts contributed to new ideas about literary canons and national character. By constructing an account of Japanese literature through the lens ofThe Water Margin's literary afterlives, Hedberg offers an alternative history of East Asian textual culture: one that focuses on the transregional dimensions of Japanese literary history and helps us rethink the definition and boundaries of Japanese literature itself.
In Body, Ritual and Identity: A New Interpretation of Yan Yuan, Yang Jui-sung has demonstrated that the complexity of Yan's ideas and his hatred for Zhu Xi in particular need be interpreted in light ...of his traumatic life experiences, his frustration over the fall of the Ming dynasty, and anxiety caused by the civil service examination system.
The Li sao (also known as Encountering Sorrow ), attributed to the poet- statesman Qu Yuan (4th–3rd century BCE), is one of the cornerstones of the Chinese poetic tradition. It has long been studied ...as China's first extended allegory in poetic form, yet most scholars agree that there is very little in the two-thousand-year-old tradition of commentary on it that convincingly explains its supernatural flights, its complex floral imagery, or the gender ambiguity of its primary poetic persona. The Shaman and the Heresiarch is the first book-length study of the Li sao in English, offering new translations of both the Li sao and the Nine Songs. The book traces the shortcomings of the earliest extant commentary on those texts, that of Wang Yi, back to the quasi- divinatory methods of the highly politicized tradition of Chinese classical hermeneutics in general, and the political machinations of a Han dynasty empress dowager in particular. It also offers an entirely new interpretation of the Li sao, one based not on Qu Yuan hagiography but on what late Warring States period artifacts and texts, including recently unearthed texts, teach us about the cultural context that produced the poem. In that light we see in the Li sao not only a reflection of the era of the great classical Chinese philosophers, but also the breakdown of the political-religious order of the ancient state of Chu.
