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The Country Of Streams And Grottoes
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Book Synopsis The Country of Streams and Grottoes by : Richard Von Glahn
Download or read book The Country of Streams and Grottoes written by Richard Von Glahn and published by Harvard Univ Asia Center. This book was released on 1987 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes how the remote Luzhou area of Sichuan became fully integrated into Chinese civilization as administrative structures emerged in towns and villages. Richard von Glahn argues that policy decisions by the central government and economic imperatives from core regions instigated and determined local development.
Book Synopsis The Country of Streams and Grottoes by : Richard von Glahn
Download or read book The Country of Streams and Grottoes written by Richard von Glahn and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the Han expansion in southern Sichuan during the Song dynasty. It seeks to discover the economic forces and political relationships that produced a characteristic regional society and landscape out of the meeting of two unlike civilizations and especially to demonstrate how pressures from the centers of Han power and culture affected life on the frontier.
Book Synopsis The Origins of the Chinese Nation by : Nicolas Tackett
Download or read book The Origins of the Chinese Nation written by Nicolas Tackett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-30 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this major new study, Nicolas Tackett proposes that the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127) witnessed both the maturation of an East Asian inter-state system and the emergence of a new worldview and sense of Chinese identity among educated elites. These developments together had sweeping repercussions for the course of Chinese history, while also demonstrating that there has existed in world history a viable alternative to the modern system of nation-states. Utilising a wide array of historical, literary, and archaeological sources, chapters focus on diplomatic sociability, cosmopolitan travel, military strategy, border demarcation, ethnic consciousness, and the cultural geography of Northeast Asia. In this ground breaking new approach to the history of the East Asian inter-state system, Tackett argues for a concrete example of a pre-modern nationalism, explores the development of this nationalism, and treats modern nationalism as just one iteration of a phenomenon with a much longer history.
Book Synopsis China's Last Imperial Frontier by : Xiuyu Wang
Download or read book China's Last Imperial Frontier written by Xiuyu Wang and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China's Last Imperial Frontier explores imperial China's frontier expansion in the Tibetan borderlands during the last decades of the Qing. The empire mounted a series of military attacks against indigenous chieftaincies and Buddhist monasteries in the east Tibetan region seeking to replace native authorities with state bureaucrats by redrawing the politically diverse frontier into a system of Chinese-style counties. Historically, at all the strategic frontier locations, the state had been for the most part outstripped by local institutions in political, military, and ideological strengths. With perceived threats from the Anglo-Russian "Great Game" accentuating Qing vulnerability in Tibet, the Sichuan government took advantage of the frontier crisis by encroaching upon local and Lhasa domains in Kham. Even though the Kham campaign was portrayed in Qing official discourse as a part of the nationwide reforms of "New Policies" (xinzheng) and administrative regularization (gaitu guiliu), its progress on the ground was influenced by the dynamics of interregional relations, including Sichuan's competition with central Tibet, power struggles among Qing frontier officials, and varied Khampa responses to the new regime. The growing regionalism intensified the resistance of local forces to imperial authority. Despite the uneven results of the late Qing campaign, it had come to serve as an important source of sovereignty claims and policy inspirations for the subsequent governments.
Book Synopsis The Cambridge History of China: pt. 1. The Sung Dynasty and its precursors, 907-1279 by : Denis Crispin Twitchett
Download or read book The Cambridge History of China: pt. 1. The Sung Dynasty and its precursors, 907-1279 written by Denis Crispin Twitchett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 1097 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first of two volumes on the Sung Dynasty (960-1279) and its Five Dynasties and Southern Kingdoms precursors presents the political history of China from the fall of the T'ang Dynasty in 907 to the Mongol conquest of the Southern Sung in 1279. Its twelve chapters survey the personalities and events that marked the rise, consolidation, and demise of the Sung polity during an era of profound social, economic, and intellectual ferment. The authors place particular emphasis on the emergence of a politically conscious literati class during the Sung, characterized by the increasing importance of the examination system early in the dynasty and on the rise of the tao-hsueh (Neo-Confucian) movement toward the end. In addition, they highlight the destabilizing influence of factionalism and ministerial despotism on Sung political culture and the impact of the powerful steppe empires of the Khitan Liao, Tangut Hsi Hsia, Jurchen Chin, and Mongol Yüan on the shape and tempo of Sung dynastic events
Book Synopsis "Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern" by : Ruth Mostern
Download or read book "Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern" written by Ruth Mostern and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: States are inherently and fundamentally geographical. Sovereignty is based on control of territory. This book uses Song China to explain how a pre-industrial regime organized itself spatially in order to exercise authority. On more than a thousand occasions, the Song court founded, abolished, promoted, demoted, and reordered jurisdictions in an attempt to maximize the effectiveness of limited resources in a climate of shifting priorities, to placate competing constituencies, and to address military and economic crises. Spatial transformations in the Song field administration changed the geography of commerce, taxation, revenue accumulation, warfare, foreign relations, and social organization, and even determined the terms of debates about imperial power. The chronology of tenth-century imperial consolidation, eleventh-century political reform, and twelfth-century localism traced in this book is a familiar one. But by detailing the relationship between the court and local administration, this book complicates the received paradigm of Song centralization and decentralization. Song frontier policies formed a coherent imperial approach to administering peripheral regions with inaccessible resources and limited infrastructure. And the well-known events of the Song—wars and reforms—were often responses to long-term spatial and demographic change.
Book Synopsis The Conquest of Ainu Lands by : Brett L. Walker
Download or read book The Conquest of Ainu Lands written by Brett L. Walker and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001-09-19 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of the Ainu in what is today far Northern Japan, showing the ecological and cultural processes by which this people's political, economic, and cultural autonomy eroded as they became an ethnic minority in the modern Japanese state.
Book Synopsis Taxing Heaven's Storehouse by : Paul J. Smith
Download or read book Taxing Heaven's Storehouse written by Paul J. Smith and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tea growing was a prosperous industry in Sichuan when Wang Anshi's New Policies created a Tea Market Agency to buy up Sichuanese tea and trade it to Tibetan tribesmaen for cavalry horses. At first the highly autonomous agency not only acquired the needed horses but made a profit. After the Junchen conquest of Noth China, however, market realities changed and the combined Tea and Horse Agency's once successful policies ruined tea farmers, failed to meet quotas for horses, and ran a deficit. Paul J. Smith details the workings of Sichuan tea farming and the tea trade, examines the geopolitical factors that forced the Song to buy horses, and graphically describes the difficulties of driving them more than a thousand miles through rugged mountains with only inexperienced conscripts as trail hands. In this study of fiscal sociology, Smith also explains how the Tea and Horse Agency transformed the Sichuan local eleite, which was notorious for its resistance to state power, into imperial civil servants eager to tax their own region. He draws on modern theories of corporate behavior to explain what made the inner workings of the Agency an extraordinary departure for the Chinese civil service; and he demonstrates how the agency put into practice the most radical New -Policies theories of state economic activism. The Agency made entrepreneurs out of bureaucrats, but ultimately became ruinously tyrannical as the system of state rewards and punishments drove its personnel to actions that crippled key sectors of the economy.
Book Synopsis Empire at the Margins by : Pamela Kyle Crossley
Download or read book Empire at the Margins written by Pamela Kyle Crossley and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006-01-19 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the Ming (1368-1644) and (especially) the Qing (1364-1912) eras, this book analyzes crucial moments in the formation of cultural, regional, and religious identities. The contributors examine the role of the state in a variety of environments on China's "peripheries," paying attention to shifts in law, trade, social stratification, and cultural dialogue. They find that local communities were critical participants in the shaping of their own identities and consciousness as well as the character and behavior of the state. At certain times the state was institutionally definitive, but it could also be symbolic and contingent. They demonstrate how the imperial discourse is many-faceted, rather than a monolithic agent of cultural assimilation.
Book Synopsis Strange Parallels: Volume 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands by : Victor Lieberman
Download or read book Strange Parallels: Volume 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands written by Victor Lieberman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-10-30 with total page 977 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blending fine-grained case studies with overarching theory, this book seeks both to integrate Southeast Asia into world history and to rethink much of Eurasia's premodern past. It argues that Southeast Asia, Europe, Japan, China, and South Asia all embodied idiosyncratic versions of a Eurasian-wide pattern whereby local isolates cohered to form ever larger, more stable, more complex political and cultural systems. With accelerating force, climatic, commercial, and military stimuli joined to produce patterns of linear-cum-cyclic construction that became remarkably synchronized even between regions that had no contact with one another. Yet this study also distinguishes between two zones of integration, one where indigenous groups remained in control and a second where agency gravitated to external conquest elites. Here, then, is a fundamentally original view of Eurasia during a 1,000-year period that speaks to both historians of individual regions and those interested in global trends.
Book Synopsis China's Encounters on the South and Southwest by : James A. Anderson
Download or read book China's Encounters on the South and Southwest written by James A. Anderson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-11-06 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China's Encounters on the South and Southwest. Reforging the Fiery Frontier Over Two Millennia discusses the mountainous territory between lowland China and Southeast Asia, what we term the Dong world, and varied encounters by China with this world's many elements. The essays describe such encounters over the past two millennia and note various asymmetric relations that have resulted therefrom. Local populations, indigenous chiefs, state officials, and rulers have all acted to shape this frontier, especially after the Mongol incursions of the thirteenth century drastically shifted it. This process has moved from the alliances of the Dong world to the indirect rule of the Tusi (native official) age to the Qing and recent Gaitu Guiliu efforts at direct rule by the state, placing regular officials in charge there. The essays detail the complexities of this frontier through time, space, and personality, particularly in those instances, as today on land and sea, when China elects to pursue an aggressive policy in this direction. Contributors include: Brantly Womack, Kenneth MacLean, Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa, Bradley Davis, Jaymin Kim, Alexander Ong, Joseph Dennis, Sun Laichen, John K. Whitmore, Kathlene Baldanza, Kenneth M. Swope, Michael Brose, James A. Anderson, Liam Kelley, and Catherine Churchman.
Book Synopsis Temples in the Cliffside by : Sonya S. Lee
Download or read book Temples in the Cliffside written by Sonya S. Lee and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At sixty-two meters the Leshan Buddha in southwest China is the world’s tallest premodern statue. Carved out of a riverside cliff in the eighth century, it has evolved from a religious center to a UNESCO World Heritage Site and popular tourist destination. But this Buddha does not stand alone: Sichuan is home to many cave temples with such monumental sculptures, part of a centuries-long tradition of art-making intricately tied to how local inhabitants made use of their natural resources with purpose and creativity. These examples of art embedded in nature have altered landscapes and have influenced the behaviors, values, and worldviews of users through multiple cycles of revival, restoration, and recreation. As hybrid spaces that are at once natural and artificial, they embody the interaction of art and the environment over a long period of time. This far-ranging study of cave temples in Sichuan shows that they are part of the world’s sustainable future, as their continued presence is a reminder of the urgency to preserve culture as part of today’s response to climate change. Temples in the Cliffside brings art history into close dialogue with current discourse on environmental issues and contributes to a new understanding of the ecological impact of artistic monuments.
Download or read book Fir and Empire written by Ian M. Miller and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book T'ang China written by S. Adshead and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-07-29 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a picture focused on the T'ang period, one of China's acknowledged golden ages. Within a looser web of globalization, the T'ang period and its dynamics offers a distant mirror of our own time. An argument in world history may thus cast light on issues in contemporary politics.
Download or read book Telling Stories written by B. J. ter Haar and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2006 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the role of oral stories in Chinese witch-hunts. Of interest to historians of oral traditions, folklore and witch-hunts, but also to those working on anti-Christian movements and the intersection of popular fears and political history in China.
Book Synopsis Fountain of Fortune by : Richard von Glahn
Download or read book Fountain of Fortune written by Richard von Glahn and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-07-28 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most striking feature of Wutong, the preeminent God of Wealth in late imperial China, was the deity’s diabolical character. Wutong was perceived not as a heroic figure or paragon but rather as an embodiment of greed and lust, a maleficent demon who preyed on the weak and vulnerable. In The Sinister Way, Richard von Glahn examines the emergence and evolution of the Wutong cult within the larger framework of the historical development of Chinese popular or vernacular religion—as opposed to institutional religions such as Buddhism or Daoism. Von Glahn’s study, spanning three millennia, gives due recognition to the morally ambivalent and demonic aspects of divine power within the common Chinese religious culture. Surveying Chinese religion from 1000 BCE to the beginning of the twentieth century, The Sinister Way views the Wutong cult as by no means an aberration. In Von Glahn’s work we see how, from earliest times, the Chinese imagined an enchanted world populated by fiendish fairies and goblins, ancient stones and trees that spring suddenly to life, ghosts of the unshriven dead, and the blood-eating spirits of the mountains and forests. From earliest times, too, we find in Chinese religious culture an abiding tension between two fundamental orientations: on one hand, belief in the power of sacrifice and exorcism to win blessings and avert calamity through direct appeal to a multitude of gods; on the other, faith in an all-encompassing moral equilibrium inhering in the cosmos.
Book Synopsis The Country Gentleman's Magazine by :
Download or read book The Country Gentleman's Magazine written by and published by . This book was released on 1870 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
