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Imperial Decision Making And Communication In Early China
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Book Synopsis Imperial Decision-making and Communication in Early China by : Enno Giele
Download or read book Imperial Decision-making and Communication in Early China written by Enno Giele and published by Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. This book was released on 2006 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The emerging Chinese empire was faced with a dilemma typical for empires, be they Roman, Mesopotamian, or Carolingian. The realm was "won on horseback, but could not be ruled from horseback," as an advisor of the Han dynasty put it. Military conquest had to be buttressed by a convincing legitimation of the supreme rule, including certain forms of power sharing, as well as by the establishment of a courtly protocol and a bureaucracy that provided for both a smooth operation of government and checks and balances. Here, the communication to and from the imperial court attained a crucial role. This study identifies the characteristics of different types of documents - imperial edicts as well as memorials, petitions, etc. - that helped to shape imperial policies. It contrasts a classification of documents by the famous intellectual Cai Yong (second century A.D.) with the remnants of courtly communication in the received sources and is able for the first time to make sense of the terse explanations that have long baffled historians of ancient China.
Book Synopsis Communication and Cooperation in Early Imperial China by : Charles Sanft
Download or read book Communication and Cooperation in Early Imperial China written by Charles Sanft and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2014-02-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenges traditional views of the Qin dynasty as an oppressive regime by revealing cooperative aspects of its governance. This revealing book challenges longstanding notions of the Qin dynasty, Chinas first imperial dynasty (221206 BCE). The received history of the Qin dynasty and its founder is one of cruel tyranny with rule through fear and coercion. Using a wealth of new information afforded by the expansion of Chinese archaeology in recent decades as well as traditional historical sources, Charles Sanft concentrates on cooperative aspects of early imperial government, especially on the communication necessary for government. Sanft suggests that the Qin authorities sought cooperation from the populace with a publicity campaign in a wide variety of mediafrom bronze and stone inscriptions to roads to the bureaucracy. The book integrates theory from anthropology and economics with early Chinese philosophy and argues that modern social science and ancient thought agree that cooperation is necessary for all human societies.
Book Synopsis State Power in Ancient China and Rome by : Walter Scheidel
Download or read book State Power in Ancient China and Rome written by Walter Scheidel and published by Oxford Studies in Early Empire. This book was released on 2015 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chinese and the Romans created the largest empires of the ancient world. Separated by thousands of miles of steppe, mountains and sea, these powerful states developed independently and with very limited awareness of each other's existence. This parallel process of state formation served as a massive natural experiment in social evolution that provides unique insight into the complexities of historical causation. Comparisons between the two empires shed new light on the factors that led to particular outcomes and help us understand similarities and differences in ancient state formation. The explicitly comparative perspective adopted in this volume opens up a dialogue between scholars from different areas of specialization, encouraging them to address big questions about the nature of imperial rule. In a series of interlocking case studies, leading experts of early China and the ancient Mediterranean explore the relationship between rulers and elite groups, the organization and funding of government, and the ways in which urban development reflected the interplay between state power and communal civic institutions.0Bureaucratization, famously associated with Qin and Han China but long less prominent in the Roman world, receives special attention as an index of the ambitions and capabilities of kings and emperors. The volume concludes with a look at the preconditions for the emergence of divine rulership. Taken together, these pioneering contributions lay the foundations for a systematic comparative history of early empires.
Book Synopsis Law, State, and Society in Early Imperial China (2 vols) by : Anthony J. Barbieri-Low
Download or read book Law, State, and Society in Early Imperial China (2 vols) written by Anthony J. Barbieri-Low and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-11-02 with total page 1544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Law, State, and Society in Early Imperial China, Anthony J. Barbieri-Low and Robin D.S. Yates offer the first detailed study and translation into English of two important early Chinese legal texts from the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE).
Book Synopsis Astral Sciences in Early Imperial China by : Daniel Patrick Morgan
Download or read book Astral Sciences in Early Imperial China written by Daniel Patrick Morgan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-03 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative history of astronomy in China, 221 BCE-750 CE, stressing plurality, change and the unifying power of myth-making.
Book Synopsis Early Chinese Religion: Part One: Shang Through Han (1250 BC-220 AD) (2 Vols) by : John Lagerwey
Download or read book Early Chinese Religion: Part One: Shang Through Han (1250 BC-220 AD) (2 Vols) written by John Lagerwey and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-12-24 with total page 1281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Together, and for the first time in any language, the 24 essays gathered in these volumes provide a composite picture of the history of religion in ancient China from the emergence of writing ca. 1250 BC to the collapse of the first major imperial dynasty in 220 AD. It is a multi-faceted tale of changing gods and rituals that includes the emergence of a form of “secular humanism” that doubts the existence of the gods and the efficacy of ritual and of an imperial orthodoxy that founds its legitimacy on a distinction between licit and illicit sacrifices. Written by specialists in a variety of disciplines, the essays cover such subjects as divination and cosmology, exorcism and medicine, ethics and self-cultivation, mythology, taboos, sacrifice, shamanism, burial practices, iconography, and political philosophy. Produced under the aegis of the Centre de recherche sur les civilisations chinoise, japonaise et tibétaine (UMR 8155) and the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris).
Book Synopsis Public Memory in Early China by : K. E. Brashier
Download or read book Public Memory in Early China written by K. E. Brashier and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early imperial China, the dead were remembered by stereotyping them, by relating them to the existing public memory and not by vaunting what made each person individually distinct and extraordinary in his or her lifetime. Their posthumous names were chosen from a limited predetermined pool; their descriptors were derived from set phrases in the classical tradition; and their identities were explicitly categorized as being like this cultural hero or that sage official in antiquity. In other words, postmortem remembrance was a process of pouring new ancestors into prefabricated molds or stamping them with rigid cookie cutters. Public Memory in Early China is an examination of this pouring and stamping process. After surveying ways in which learning in the early imperial period relied upon memorization and recitation, K. E. Brashier treats three definitive parameters of identity—name, age, and kinship—as ways of negotiating a person’s relative position within the collective consciousness. He then examines both the tangible and intangible media responsible for keeping that defined identity welded into the infrastructure of Han public memory.
Download or read book Chang'an 26 BCE written by Michael Nylan and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2015-05-21 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the last two centuries BCE, the Western Han capital of Chang'an, near today's Xi'an in northwest China, outshone Augustan Rome in several ways while administering comparable numbers of imperial subjects and equally vast territories. At its grandest, during the last fifty years or so before the collapse of the dynasty in 9 CE, Chang�an boasted imperial libraries with thousands of documents on bamboo and silk in a city nearly three times the size of Rome and nearly four times larger than Alexandria. Many reforms instituted in this capital in ate Western Han substantially shaped not only the institutions of the Eastern Han (25�220 CE) but also the rest of imperial China until 1911. Although thousands of studies document imperial Rome�s glory, until now no book-length work in a Western language has been devoted to Han Chang�an, the reign of Emperor Chengdi (whose accomplishments rival those of Augustus and Hadrian), or the city's impressive library project (26-6 BCE), which ultimately produced the first state-sponsored versions of many of the classics and masterworks that we hold in our hands today. Chang�an 26 BCE addresses this deficiency, using as a focal point the reign of Emperor Chengdi (r. 33�7 bce), specifically the year in which the imperial library project began. This in-depth survey by some of the world�s best scholars, Chinese and Western, explores the built environment, sociopolitical transformations, and leading figures of Chang�an, making a strong case for the revision of historical assumptions about the two Han dynasties. A multidisciplinary volume representing a wealth of scholarly perspectives, the book draws on the established historical record and recent archaeological discoveries of thousands of tombs, building foundations, and remnants of walls and gates from Chang�an and its surrounding area.
Book Synopsis Forming the Early Chinese Court by : Luke Habberstad
Download or read book Forming the Early Chinese Court written by Luke Habberstad and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forming the Early Chinese Court builds on new directions in comparative studies of royal courts in the ancient world to present a pioneering study of early Chinese court culture. Rejecting divides between literary, political, and administrative texts, Luke Habberstad examines sources from the Qin, Western Han, and Xin periods (221 BCE–23 CE) for insights into court society and ritual, rank, the development of the bureaucracy, and the role of the emperor. These diverse sources show that a large, but not necessarily cohesive, body of courtiers drove the consolidation, distribution, and representation of power in court institutions. Forming the Early Chinese Court encourages us to see China’s imperial unification as a surprisingly idiosyncratic process that allowed different actors to stake claims in a world of increasing population, wealth, and power.
Book Synopsis Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China by : Roel Sterckx
Download or read book Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China written by Roel Sterckx and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-28 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In ancient China, the preparation of food and the offering up of food as a religious sacrifice were intimately connected with models of sagehood and ideas of self-cultivation and morality. Drawing on received and newly excavated written sources, Roel Sterckx's book explores how this vibrant culture influenced the ways in which the early Chinese explained the workings of the human senses, and the role of sensory experience in communicating with the spirit world. The book, which begins with a survey of dietary culture from the Zhou to the Han, offers intriguing insights into the ritual preparation of food - some butchers and cooks were highly regarded and would rise to positions of influence as a result of their culinary skills - and the sacrificial ceremony itself. As a major contribution to the study of early China and to the development of philosophical thought, the book will be essential reading for students of the period, and for anyone interested in ritual and religion in the ancient world.
Book Synopsis Rulers and Ruled in Ancient Greece, Rome, and China by : Hans Beck
Download or read book Rulers and Ruled in Ancient Greece, Rome, and China written by Hans Beck and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-04 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparative study of the ancient Mediterranean and Han China, seen through the lens of political culture.
Book Synopsis Genre Networks and Empire by : Xiaoye You
Download or read book Genre Networks and Empire written by Xiaoye You and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that political persuasion expanded in early imperial China through diverse written genres, and that what ancient Chinese called wenti jingwei, or genre networks, provides the central means to understand rhetoric and government at the time.
Book Synopsis Envisioning Eternal Empire by : Yuri Pines
Download or read book Envisioning Eternal Empire written by Yuri Pines and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2008-12-19 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ambitious book looks into the reasons for the exceptional durability of the Chinese empire, which lasted for more than two millennia (221 BCE–1911 CE). Yuri Pines identifies the roots of the empire’s longevity in the activities of thinkers of the Warring States period (453–221 BCE), who, in their search for solutions to an ongoing political crisis, developed ideals, values, and perceptions that would become essential for the future imperial polity. In marked distinction to similar empires worldwide, the Chinese empire was envisioned and to a certain extent "preplanned" long before it came into being. As a result, it was not only a military and administrative construct, but also an intellectual one. Pines makes the argument that it was precisely its ideological appeal that allowed the survival and regeneration of the empire after repeated periods of turmoil. Envisioning Eternal Empire presents a panoptic survey of philosophical and social conflicts in Warring States political culture. By examining the extant corpus of preimperial literature, including transmitted texts and manuscripts uncovered at archaeological sites, Pines locates the common ideas of competing thinkers that underlie their ideological controversies. This bold approach allows him to transcend the once fashionable perspective of competing "schools of thought" and show that beneath the immense pluralism of Warring States thought one may identify common ideological choices that eventually shaped traditional Chinese political culture. The result is a refreshingly novel look at the foundational period in Chinese intellectual history. Pines’ analysis of the political thought of the period focuses on the thinkers’ perceptions of three main components of the preimperial and imperial polity: the ruler, the elite, and the commoners. Regarding each of them, he identifies both the common ground and unresolved intrinsic tensions of Warring States discourse. Thus, while thinkers staunchly supported the idea of the omnipotent universal monarch, they were also aware of the mediocrity and ineptitude of acting sovereigns. They were committed to a career in government yet feared to compromise their integrity in service of corrupt rulers. They declared their dedication to "the people" yet firmly opposed the lower strata’s input in political processes. Pines asserts that the persistence of these unresolved tensions eventually became one of the most important assets of China’s political culture. The ensuing imperial political system was not excessively rigid, but sufficiently flexible to adapt itself to a variety of domestic and foreign pressures. This remarkable adaptability within the constant ideological framework contributed decisively to the empire’s longevity.
Book Synopsis Fakes and Forgeries of Written Artefacts from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern China by : Cécile Michel
Download or read book Fakes and Forgeries of Written Artefacts from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern China written by Cécile Michel and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-11-23 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fakes and forgeries are objects of fascination. This volume contains a series of thirteen articles devoted to fakes and forgeries of written artefacts from the beginnings of writing in Mesopotamia to modern China. The studies emphasise the subtle distinctions conveyed by an established vocabulary relating to the reproduction of ancient artefacts and production of artefacts claiming to be ancient: from copies, replicas and imitations to fakes and forgeries. Fakes are often a response to a demand from the public or scholarly milieu, or even both. The motives behind their production may be economic, political, religious or personal – aspiring to fame or simply playing a joke. Fakes may be revealed by combining the study of their contents, codicological, epigraphic and palaeographic analyses, and scientific investigations. However, certain famous unsolved cases still continue to defy technology today, no matter how advanced it is. Nowadays, one can find fakes in museums and private collections alike; they abound on the antique market, mixed with real artefacts that have often been looted. The scientific community’s attitude to such objects calls for ethical reflection.
Book Synopsis Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies by : Sitta Reden
Download or read book Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies written by Sitta Reden and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-12-02 with total page 954 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion of the “Silk Road” that the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen invented in the 19th century has lost attraction to scholars in light of large amounts of new evidence and new approaches. The handbook suggests new conceptual and methodological tools for researching ancient economic exchange in a global perspective with a strong focus on recent debates on the nature of pre-modern empires. The interdisciplinary team of Chinese, Indian and Graeco-Roman historians, archaeologists and anthropologists that has written this handbook compares different forms of economic development in agrarian and steppe regions in a period of accelerated empire formation during 300 BCE and 300 CE. It investigates inter-imperial zones and networks of exchange which were crucial for ancient Eurasian connections. Volume I provides a comparative history of the most important empires forming in Northern Africa, Europe and Asia between 300 BCE and 300 CE. It surveys a wide range of evidence that can be brought to bear on economic development in the these empires, and takes stock of the ways academic traditions have shaped different understandings of economic and imperial development as well as Silk-Road exchange in Russia, China, India and Western Graeco-Roman history.
Book Synopsis Entombed Epigraphy and Commemorative Culture in Early Medieval China by : Timothy M. Davis
Download or read book Entombed Epigraphy and Commemorative Culture in Early Medieval China written by Timothy M. Davis and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-11-09 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Entombed Epigraphy and Commemorative Culture Timothy M. Davis explains the social, cultural, and religious significance of early medieval muzhiming —one of the most versatile and persistent commemorative forms employed in the elite burials of pre-modern China.
Book Synopsis Perduring Protest? by : Thomas Crone
Download or read book Perduring Protest? written by Thomas Crone and published by V&R Unipress. This book was released on 2023-12-04 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early Chinese inscriptions show that already the kings of the Western Zhou period (1045–771 BCE) called upon officials to submit remonstrances. However, it was not until the Warring States period (fifth century BCE to 221 BCE) that remonstrance was explained to mean that monarchical rule would be optimized if officials could object to the monarch's decisions. This book examines the history of remonstrance in China from conceptual, institutional, literary, and comparative perspectives, pointing out parallels to European institutions and the expression of dissent in modern China. Special attention is paid to the historical semantics of remonstrance, the strategies and intentions of remonstrants, and the perspective of the rulers who instrumentalized criticism to pursue their own goals.
