In this learned, yet readable, book, Joseph McDermott introduces the history of the book in China in the late imperial period from 1000 to 1800. He assumes little knowledge of Chinese history or ...culture and compares the Chinese experience with books with
The disappearance of China's naturally occurring forests is one of the most significant environmental shifts in the country's history, one often blamed on imperial demand for lumber. China's early ...modern forest history is typically viewed as a centuries-long process of environmental decline, culminating in a nineteenth-century social and ecological crisis. Pushing back against this narrative of deforestation, Ian Miller charts the rise of timber plantations between about 1000 and 1700, when natural forests were replaced with anthropogenic ones. Miller demonstrates that this form of forest management generally rested on private ownership under relatively distant state oversight and taxation. He further draws on in-depth case studies of shipbuilding and imperial logging to argue that this novel landscape was not created through simple extractive pressures, but by attempts to incorporate institutional and ecological complexity into a unified imperial state. Miller uses the emergence of anthropogenic forests in south China to rethink both temporal and spatial frameworks for Chinese history and the nature of Chinese empire. Because dominant European forestry models do not neatly overlap with the non-Western world, China's history is often left out of global conversations about them; Miller's work rectifies this omission and suggests that in some ways, China's forest system may have worked better than the more familiar European institutions.
Late imperial Chinese Buddhism was long dismissed as having declined from the glories of Buddhism during the Sui and Tang dynasties (581-907). In recent scholarship, a more nuanced picture of late ...Ming-era Buddhist renewal has emerged. Yet this alternate conception of the history of Buddhism in China has tended to focus on either doctrinal contributions of individual masters or the roles of local elites in Jiangnan, leaving unsolved broader questions regarding the dynamics and mechanism behind the evolution of Buddhism into the renewal. Thriving in Crisis is a systematic study of the late Ming Buddhist renewal with a focus on the religious and political factors that enabled it to happen. Dewei Zhang explores the history of the boom in enthusiasm for Buddhism in the Jiajing-Wanli era (1522-1620), tracing a pattern of advances and retrenchment at different social levels in varied regions. He reveals that the Buddhist renewal was a dynamic movement that engaged a wide swath of elites, from emperors and empress dowagers to eunuchs and scholar-officials. Drawing on a range of evidence and approaches, Zhang contends that the late Ming renewal was a politically driven exception to a longer-term current of disfavor toward Buddhism and that it failed to establish Buddhism on a foundation solid enough for its future development. A groundbreaking interdisciplinary study, Thriving in Crisis provides a new theoretical framework for understanding the patterns of Buddhist history in China.
The East Asian War of 1592 to 1598 was the only extended war before modern times to involve Japan, Korea, and China. It devastated huge swathes of Korea and led to large population movements across ...borders. This book draws on surviving letters and diaries to recount the personal experiences of five individuals from different backgrounds who lived through the war and experienced its devastating effects: a Chinese doctor who became a spy; a Japanese samurai on his first foreign expedition; a Korean gentleman turned refugee; a Korean scholar-diplomat; and a Japanese Buddhist monk involved in the atrocities of the invasion. The book outlines the context of the war so that readers can understand the background against which the writers’ lives were lived, allows the individual voices of the five men and their reflections on events to come through, and casts much light on prevailing attitudes and conditions, including cultural interaction, identity, cross-border information networks, class conflict, the role of religion in society, and many others aspects of each writer’s world.
Prologue: Witnesses to the Largest Conflict of the Sixteenth Century
1. Warning of the Tsunami to Come: Xu Yihou, patriot in exile
2. Glory in Defeat: Yoshino Jingozaemon, warrior of Japan
3. Between a Tiger and Wolves: Oh Hŭimun, refugee in his own land
4. When Peace Broke: Hwang Shin, intrepid ambassador
5. Descent into Hell: Keinen, reluctant invader
6. A World Connected: Oh Hŭimun, one among many
7. Post War: Stories retold, countries reimagined
Epilogue: The War of 1592-1598 and National Identity
J. Marshall Craig completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford.
This is a collection of essays by one of the leading scholars of Chinese history, Patricia Buckley. In the essays she has selected for this fascinating volume, Professor Ebrey explores features of ...the Chinese family, gender and kinship systems as practices and ideas intimately connected to history and therefore subject to change over time. The essays cover topics ranging from dowries and the sale of women into forced concubinary, to the excesses of the imperial harem, excruciating pain of footbinding, and Confucian ideas of womanly virtue. Patricia Ebrey places these sociological analyses of women within the family in an historical context, analysing the development of the wider kinship system. Her work provides an overview of the early modern period, with a specific focus on the Song period (920-1276), a time of marked social and cultural change, and considered to be the beginning of the modern period in Chinese history. With its wide-ranging examination of issues relating to women and the family, this book will be essential reading to scholars of Chinese history and gender studies.
Professor Buckley Ebrey is Professor of History and Chinese Studies at the University of Washington. She has published widely on Chinese history.
Introduction 1. Women, Money, and Class: Sima Guang and neo-Confucian views on women 2. Concubines in Song China 3. Shifts in Marriage Finance: The sixth through thirteenth centuries 4. The Women in Liu Kezhuang's Family 5. The Early Stages of the Development of Descent Group Organization 6. Cremation in Song China 7. Surnames and Han Chinese Identity 8. Rethinking the Imperial Harem: Why were there so many women? 9. Gender and Sinology: Shifts in Western interpretations of footbinding, 1300-1890
This comprehensive survey of Chinese military history is the only book in English to span the significant years from 900 – 1795. Peter Lorge questions current theories on China’s relationship to war, ...and argues that war was the most important tool used by the Chinese in building and maintaining their empire.
Emphasizing the relationship between the military and politics, chapters are organised around specific military events and, Lorge argues, the strength of territorial claims and political impact of each dynasty were determined by their military capacity.
Ideal as a course adoption text for Asian military studies, this is also valuable for students of Chinese studies, military studies and Chinese history.
Peter Lorge is Senior Lecturer in Chinese History and Film at Vanderbilt University.
1. Unity Through War (900-1005) 2. Empires at Peace, Empires at War, 1005-1142 3. 1142-1272, Three Empires and A Century of War 4. A Chinese Empire? (1272-1355) 5. The Chinese Conquest Dynasty, 1355-1435 6. 1435-1610, The Politics of Imperial Collapse 7. 1610-1683, A People Created for War 8. 1684-1795, The Old Man of Ten Complete Military Victories
Five Hundred Years of Chinese Poetryoffers the only historical survey, in any language, of this important span of Chinese poetry. Written by the foremost Japanese sinologist of this century, and ...translated here in a lucid analogue to his famous prose style, the work provides a brief but comprehensive review of the period's literary history, a sketch of its political and social history in relation to literature, and a rendering of more than one hundred and fifty poems.
Originally published in 1992.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Celestial women McMahon, Keith
2016., 2016, 2016-04-21
eBook
This volume completes Keith McMahon's acclaimed history of imperial wives and royal polygamy in China. Avoiding the stereotype of the emperor's plural wives as mere victims or playthings, the book ...considers empresses and concubines as full-fledged participants in palace life, whether as mothers, wives, or go-betweens in the emperor's relations with others in the palace. Although restrictions on women's participation in politics increased dramatically after Empress Wu in the Tang, the author follows the strong and active women, of both high and low rank, who continued to appear. They counseled emperors, ghostwrote for them, oversaw succession when they died, and dominated them when they were weak. They influenced the emperor's relationships with other women and enhanced their aura and that of the royal house with their acts of artistic and religious patronage. Dynastic history ended in China when the prohibition that women should not rule was defied for the final time by Dowager Cixi, the last great monarch before China's transformation into a republic.
An innovative look at how families in Ming dynasty China negotiated military and political obligations to the state
How did ordinary people in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) deal with the demands of ...the state? In The Art of Being Governed , Michael Szonyi explores the myriad ways that families fulfilled their obligations to provide a soldier to the army. The complex strategies they developed to manage their responsibilities suggest a new interpretation of an important period in China’s history as well as a broader theory of politics.
Using previously untapped sources, including lineage genealogies and internal family documents, Szonyi examines how soldiers and their families living on China’s southeast coast minimized the costs and maximized the benefits of meeting government demands for manpower. Families that had to provide a soldier for the army set up elaborate rules to ensure their obligation was fulfilled, and to provide incentives for the soldier not to desert his post. People in the system found ways to gain advantages for themselves and their families. For example, naval officers used the military’s protection to engage in the very piracy and smuggling they were supposed to suppress. Szonyi demonstrates through firsthand accounts how subjects of the Ming state operated in a space between defiance and compliance, and how paying attention to this middle ground can help us better understand not only Ming China but also other periods and places.
Combining traditional scholarship with innovative fieldwork in the villages where descendants of Ming subjects still live, The Art of Being Governed illustrates the ways that arrangements between communities and the state hundreds of years ago have consequences and relevance for how we look at diverse cultures and societies, even today.
