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.
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., Volume:
99
eBook
Open access
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.
Zebra finch song perception is assumed to primarily involve a high sensitivity to fine spectral features of song elements while other features like element sequence and song duration do not seem to ...have a notable effect. However, the specific features that zebra finches focus on when identifying or discriminating sounds may not be as fixed as seems to be assumed and might depend on the characteristics of the stimuli. This apparent flexibility in auditory processing, along with the potential salience of differences in song duration for song perception, highlights the need for systematic research on the acoustic parameters that zebra finches can use to differentiate between songs. By employing a Go-Left/Go-Right operant task, we examined whether and how differences in song duration affect zebra finches' relative sensitivity for spectral features and duration in song recognition. Two groups of zebra finches were trained in a Go-Left/Go-Right operant task to discriminate between either two songs with similar durations (‘Equal-duration group’) or two songs with different durations (‘Unequal-duration group’). We assessed to what extent the birds in the two experimental groups attend to the spectral characteristics and the absolute duration of the songs by measuring the responses to test stimuli consisting of spectral modifications or temporal changes. Our results showed that zebra finches use both spectral features and song duration to discriminate between two songs, but the importance of these acoustic parameters depended on whether the songs differed in duration or not. When duration can be used as an additional feature to distinguish two songs, spectral features have a less prominent role. This outcome shows that zebra finches have cognitive flexibility in their attention to different acoustic parameters.
•Zebra finches learn to discriminate songs of equal and unequal duration equally fast.•Song duration is used to discriminate songs when their difference is substantial.•Zebra finches prioritize spectral details over spectral envelope for song recognition.•Zebra finches are flexible in the features they use to recognize songs.
This paper describes a 30-year investigation into the role of social and ecological factors affecting song learning in song sparrows, Melospiza melodia. It addresses the question of why song sparrows ...learn the songs they do, given that they are exposed to many more songs than they will keep for their final repertoire of 7–11 song types. A young song sparrow moves from his natal area at about 1 month of age, eventually settling in an area where he learns the songs of the resident males and attempts to establish his own territory. Birds that share many songs with their neighbours in their first breeding season (the spring following their hatch summer) survive for more years on territory than birds that do not. Many features of the song-learning process lead to a high level of sharing with first-year neighbours, including preferentially learning the songs of their tutor-neighbours who survive the winter, and learning songs that are shared by several tutors. Social interaction appears to be critical in song learning, but indirect effects (eavesdropping on adults countersinging) seem to be at least as important as direct interaction between the young bird and his tutor-neighbours. Although our evidence suggests that the song-learning strategy of young song sparrows is beneficial to them, a preliminary analysis suggests it may not benefit their tutors.
•Western song sparrows preferentially learn songs that their neighbours share.•Shared songs are critical in neighbour territory negotiations.•Survival studies suggest this song learning strategy benefits the song learner.•Song tutoring does not appear to benefit the song tutors.•Eastern song sparrows do not follow this strategy despite similar demographies.
The contemporary debate regarding the neo-allegorical Song of Songs interpretation focuses more on its legitimacy than on how it is done. If allegorical interpretation promotes uncontrollable ...subjective interpretation, this would especially surface when different religious traditions are involved. Moreover, if allegorical interpretation is done to avoid dealing with explicit sexuality in the Song, comparing texts from three diverse religious traditions on the more erotic parts of the Song has the potential to provide insight not only in the method of allegory but also in the contextuality and subjectivity of interpretation as such. The paper discusses examples from the Targum, the Calvinistic Dutch Statenbijbel and Luther’s lectures on the Canticles.
The Works of Li Qingzhao Allen, Sarah M; Kroll, Paul; Nugent, Christopher M. B ...
De Gruyter eBooks,
2019, 2019-01-29
eBook
Open access
This volume is a translation of the song lyrics, poetry, and prose of Li Qingzhao (1084-1150s), with annotations and an introductory critical essay. Her song lyrics and poetry will be presented in a ...way to help readers get beyond traditional conventional images of her and gain insight into her originality and importance as a female voice in a literary world of her time that was almost exclusively male.
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.
During the Late Paleozoic to Cenozoic, with the closure of the Tethys oceans, the East and/or Southeast Asia was amalgamated by individual blocks. In order to understand the Paleogeography of the ...Eastern Paleo-Tethys, a systematic Usingle bondPb dating on 11 samples have conducted to constrain the age and provenance of the elements forming the Ailaoshan-Song Ma mélange. These samples consist of the ophiolitic mélange zone (6 samples), the sedimentary cover of the Indochina block (4 samples), and the post-orogenic continental deposits (1 samples). The achieved detrital zircon age distribution, and the corresponding in-situ Hf isotopic recorder allow us to discuss the provenances of the materials involved in the tectonic processes during the subduction and collision. Three units (M1, M2, M3), which stand for the different segment of the suture zone, could be separated based on the differences in zircon age clusters and Hf isotopic values. These differences might be due to the variety of provenances. Combined with the previous works, especially our work on the Song Chay mélange zone, we concluded that both upper and lower plates are potential provenances for the mélanges between South China block and Indochina block. Along the suture zone, the component of the mélange presents a significant heterogeneity.
Opposing Democracy in the Digital Age is about why ordinary people in a democratizing state oppose democracy and how they leverage both traditional and social media to do so. Aim Sinpeng focuses on ...the people behind popular, large-scale antidemocratic movements that helped bring down democracy in 2006 and 2014 in Thailand. The yellow shirts (PAD—People’s Alliance for Democracy) that are the focus of the book are antidemocratic movements grown out of democratic periods in Thailand, but became the catalyst for the country’s democratic breakdown. Why, when, and how supporters of these movements mobilize offline and online to bring down democracy are some of the key questions that Sinpeng answers. While the book primarily uses a qualitative methodological approach, it also uses several quantitative tools to analyze social media data in the later chapters. This is one of few studies in the field of regime transition that focuses on antidemocratic mobilization and takes the role of social media seriously.
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