Writing Publishing And Reading Local Gazetteers In Imperial China 1100 1700

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Writing, Publishing, and Reading Local Gazetteers in Imperial China, 1100–1700

Author : Joseph R. Dennis
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 1684175542
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (841 download)

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Book Synopsis Writing, Publishing, and Reading Local Gazetteers in Imperial China, 1100–1700 by : Joseph R. Dennis

Download or read book Writing, Publishing, and Reading Local Gazetteers in Imperial China, 1100–1700 written by Joseph R. Dennis and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is the definitive study of imperial Chinese local gazetteers, one of the most important sources for premodern Chinese studies. Methodologically innovative, it represents a major contribution to the history of books, publishing, reading, and society.By examining how gazetteers were read, Joseph R. Dennis illustrates their significance in local societies and national discourses. His analysis of how gazetteers were initiated and produced reconceptualizes the geography of imperial Chinese publishing. Whereas previous studies argued that publishing, and thus cultural and intellectual power, were concentrated in the southeast, Dennis shows that publishing and book ownership were widely dispersed throughout China and books were found even in isolated locales. Adding a dynamic element to our earlier understanding of the publishing industry, Dennis tracks the movements of manuscripts to printers and print labor to production sites. By reconstructing printer business zones, he demonstrates that publishers operated across long distances in trans-regional markets. He also creates the first substantial data set on publishing costs in early modern China—a foundational breakthrough in understanding the world of Chinese books. Dennis’s work reveals areas for future research on newly-identified regional publishing centers and the economics of book production."

Know Your Remedies

Author : He Bian
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691200130
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (912 download)

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Book Synopsis Know Your Remedies by : He Bian

Download or read book Know Your Remedies written by He Bian and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Traditional Chinese medicine has been practiced in various forms for more than a thousand years. Practitioners may heal patients with herbal remedies, acupuncture, massage, exercise, and modified diets. Even today, herbal medicines are of particular importance; Chinese pharmacies containing a vast array of remedies can be found in cities and towns the world over. This book is an interdisciplinary and cultural history of the concept of "pharmacy," both the drugs themselves and the trade in medicine, during the Ming and Qing dynasties of early modern China. This was a time of change for traditional Chinese medicine and for Chinese science as a whole. Many historians have argued that sixteenth-century China was a high point of scientific inquiry, followed by a period of intellectual decline. Though political and intellectual shifts led to a crisis of authority over pharmaceutical knowledge in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, Bian argues that this period of supposed intellectual decline was in fact characterized by numerous efforts to further refine and spread the pharmacological knowledge amassed in the Ming dynasty. She draws on a wide range of primary sources, but particularly through the study of bencao (pronounced "pen ts'ao"), a genre of encyclopaedic works, often called matteria medica or pharmacopoeia in the West, that collect information on medicinal substances. As the early modern Chinese Empire expanded and print culture became more widespread, the pursuit of medical remedies became a significant commercial enterprise. The author connects theory and practice of pharmacy during the Ming and Qing dynasties to broader developments in intellectual history, book culture, commerce, and taxation"--

Orthodox Passions

Author : Maram Epstein
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 1684176069
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (841 download)

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Book Synopsis Orthodox Passions by : Maram Epstein

Download or read book Orthodox Passions written by Maram Epstein and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking interdisciplinary study, Maram Epstein identifies filial piety as the dominant expression of love in Qing dynasty texts. At a time when Manchu regulations made chastity the primary metaphor for obedience and social duty, filial discourse increasingly embraced the dramatic and passionate excesses associated with late-Ming chastity narratives. Qing texts, especially those from the Jiangnan region, celebrate modes of filial piety that conflicted with the interests of the patriarchal family and the state. Analyzing filial narratives from a wide range of primary texts, including local gazetteers, autobiographical and biographical nianpu records, and fiction, Epstein shows the diversity of acts constituting exemplary filial piety. This context, Orthodox Passions argues, enables a radical rereading of the great novel of manners The Story of the Stone (ca. 1760), whose absence of filial affections and themes make it an outlier in the eighteenth-century sentimental landscape. By decentering romantic feeling as the dominant expression of love during the High Qing, Orthodox Passions calls for a new understanding of the affective landscape of late imperial China.

Writing for Print

Author : Suyoung Son
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 1684170966
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (841 download)

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Book Synopsis Writing for Print by : Suyoung Son

Download or read book Writing for Print written by Suyoung Son and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book examines the widespread practice of self-publishing by writers in late imperial China, focusing on the relationships between manuscript tradition and print convention, peer patronage and popular fame, and gift exchange and commercial transactions in textual production and circulation.Combining approaches from various disciplines, such as history of the book, literary criticism, and bibliographical and textual studies, Suyoung Son reconstructs the publishing practices of two seventeenth-century literati-cum-publishers, Zhang Chao in Yangzhou and Wang Zhuo in Hangzhou, and explores the ramifications of these practices on eighteenth-century censorship campaigns in Qing China and Chosŏn Korea. By giving due weight to the writers as active agents in increasing the influence of print, this book underscores the contingent nature of print’s effect and its role in establishing the textual authority that the literati community, commercial book market, and imperial authorities competed to claim in late imperial China."

Information

Author : Ann Blair
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691179549
Total Pages : 902 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (911 download)

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Book Synopsis Information by : Ann Blair

Download or read book Information written by Ann Blair and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 902 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Information technology shapes nearly every part of modern life, and debates about information--its meaning, effects, and applications--are central to a range of fields, from economics, technology, and politics to library science, media studies, and cultural studies. This rich, unique resource traces the history of information with an approach designed to draw connections across fields and perspectives, and provide essential context for our current age of information. Clear, accessible, and authoritative, the book opens with a series of articles that provide a narrative history of information from premodern practices to twenty-first-century information culture. This section focuses on major developments in the creation, storage, search, exchange, management, and manipulation of information, as well as the many meanings and uses of information over time. Coverage spans Europe, North America, and many other places and periods, including the medieval Islamic world and early modern East Asia, as well as the emergence of global networks. A second, alphabetical section includes more than 100 concise articles that cover specific concepts (e.g., data, intellectual property, privacy); formats and genres (books, databases, maps, newspapers, scrolls, social media); people (archivists, diplomats and spies, readers, secretaries, teachers); practices (censorship, forecasting, learning, surveilling, translating); processes (digitization, quantification, storage and search); systems (bureaucracy, platforms, telecommunications); technologies (algorithms, cameras, computers), and much more. The book concludes with an informative glossary, defining terms from "analog/digital" to "World Wide Web.""--

Huizhou

Author : Prof. Qitao Guo
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520385225
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (23 download)

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Book Synopsis Huizhou by : Prof. Qitao Guo

Download or read book Huizhou written by Prof. Qitao Guo and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Huizhou studies the construction of local identity through kinship in the prefecture of Huizhou, the most prominent merchant stronghold of Ming China. Employing an array of untapped genealogies and other sources, Qitao Guo explores how developments in the sociocultural, religious, and gender realms from the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries intertwined to shape Huizhou identity as a land of "prominent lineages." This gentrified self-image both sheltered and guided the development of mercantile lineages, which were further bolstered by the gender regime and the local religious order. As Guo demonstrates, the discrepancy between representation and practice helps explain Huizhou's triumphs. The more active the economy became, the more those central to its commercialization embraced conservative sociocultural norms. Home lineages embraced neo-Confucian orthodoxy even as they provided the financial and logistical support to assure the success of Huizhou merchants. The end result was not "capitalism" but a gentrified mercantile lineage culture with Chinese—or Huizhou—characteristics.

Jade Mountains and Cinnabar Pools

Author : James M. Hargett
Publisher : University of Washington Press
ISBN 13 : 0295744480
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (957 download)

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Book Synopsis Jade Mountains and Cinnabar Pools by : James M. Hargett

Download or read book Jade Mountains and Cinnabar Pools written by James M. Hargett and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2018-12-21 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First-hand accounts of travel provide windows into places unknown to the reader, or new ways of seeing familiar places. In Jade Mountains and Cinnabar Pools, the first book-length treatment in English of Chinese travel literature (youji), James M. Hargett identifies and examines core works in the genre, from the Six Dynasties period (220�581), when its essential characteristics emerged, to its florescence in the late Ming dynasty (1368�1644). He traces the dynamic process through which the genre, most of which was written by scholars and officials, developed, and shows that key features include a journey toward an identifiable place; essay or diary format; description of places, phenomena, and conditions, accompanied by authorial observations, comments, and even personal feelings; inclusion of sensory details; and narration of movement through space and time. Travel literature�s inclusion of a variety of writing styles and purposes has made it hard to delineate. Hargett finds, however, that classic pieces of Chinese travel literature reveal much about the author, his values, and his view of the world, which in turn tells us about the author�s society, making travel literature a rich source of historical information.

The Aura of Confucius

Author : Julia K. Murray
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1316516326
Total Pages : 361 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (165 download)

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Book Synopsis The Aura of Confucius by : Julia K. Murray

Download or read book The Aura of Confucius written by Julia K. Murray and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-25 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking study highlights the importance of images within Confucianism and to a shrine-tomb for Confucius's buried robe and cap.

The Book Worlds of East Asia and Europe, 1450–1850

Author : Joseph P. McDermott
Publisher : Hong Kong University Press
ISBN 13 : 988820808X
Total Pages : 364 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (882 download)

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Book Synopsis The Book Worlds of East Asia and Europe, 1450–1850 by : Joseph P. McDermott

Download or read book The Book Worlds of East Asia and Europe, 1450–1850 written by Joseph P. McDermott and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides the first comparative survey of the relations between the two most active book worlds in Eurasia between 1450 and 1850. Prominent scholars in book history explore different approaches to publishing, printing, and book culture. They discuss the extent of technology transfer and book distribution between the two regions and show how much book historians of East Asia and Europe can learn from one another by raising new questions, exploring remarkable similarities and differences in these regions’ production, distribution, and consumption of books. The chapters in turn show different ways of writing transnational comparative history. Whereas recent problems confronting research on European books can instruct researchers on East Asian book production, so can the privileged role of noncommercial publications in the East Asian textual record highlight for historians of the European book the singular contribution of commercial printing and market demands to the making of the European printed record. Likewise, although production growth was accompanied in both regions by a wider distribution of books, woodblock technology’s simplicity and mobility allowed for a shift in China of its production and distribution sites farther down the hierarchy of urban sites than was common in Europe. And, the different demands and consumption practices within these two regions’ expanding markets led to different genre preferences and uses as well as to the growth of distinctive female readerships. A substantial introduction pulls the work together and the volume ends with an essay that considers how these historical developments shape the present book worlds of Eurasia. “This splendid volume offers expert new insight into the ways of producing, financing, distributing, and reading printed books in early modern Europe and East Asia. This is comparative history at its best, which leaves us with a better understanding of each context and of the challenges common to book cultures across space and time.” —Ann Blair, author of Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age and professor of history, Harvard University “This engrossing account of the history of the book by leading specialists on the European and East Asian publishing worlds takes stock of what we know—and how much we still need to know—about the places that books had in the lives of our early modern forebears. Each chapter is masterful state-of-the-field coverage of its subject, and together they set a new standard for future studies of the book, East and West.” —Timothy Brook, author of The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties

Becoming Guanyin

Author : Yuhang Li
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231548737
Total Pages : 365 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Becoming Guanyin by : Yuhang Li

Download or read book Becoming Guanyin written by Yuhang Li and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2024 Geiss-Hsu Book Prize for Best First Book, Society for Ming Studies The goddess Guanyin began in India as the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, originally a male deity. He gradually became indigenized as a female deity in China over the span of nearly a millennium. By the Ming (1358–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) periods, Guanyin had become the most popular female deity in China. In Becoming Guanyin, Yuhang Li examines how lay Buddhist women in late imperial China forged a connection with the subject of their devotion, arguing that women used their own bodies to echo that of Guanyin. Li focuses on the power of material things to enable women to access religious experience and transcendence. In particular, she examines how secular Buddhist women expressed mimetic devotion and pursued religious salvation through creative depictions of Guanyin in different media such as painting and embroidery and through bodily portrayals of the deity using jewelry and dance. These material displays expressed a worldview that differed from yet fit within the Confucian patriarchal system. Attending to the fabrication and use of “women’s things” by secular women, Li offers new insight into the relationships between worshipped and worshipper in Buddhist practice. Combining empirical research with theoretical insights from both art history and Buddhist studies, Becoming Guanyin is a field-changing analysis that reveals the interplay between material culture, religion, and their gendered transformations.

Information, Territory, and Networks

Author : Hilde De Weerdt
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 1684175631
Total Pages : 542 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (841 download)

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Book Synopsis Information, Territory, and Networks by : Hilde De Weerdt

Download or read book Information, Territory, and Networks written by Hilde De Weerdt and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The occupation of the northern half of the Chinese territories in the 1120s brought about a transformation in political communication in the south that had lasting implications for imperial Chinese history. By the late eleventh century, the Song court no longer dominated the production of information about itself and its territories. Song literati gradually consolidated their position as producers, users, and discussants of court gazettes, official records, archival compilations, dynastic histories, military geographies, and maps. This development altered the relationship between court and literati in political communication for the remainder of the imperial period. Based on a close reading of reader responses to official records and derivatives and on a mapping of literati networks, the author further proposes that the twelfth-century geopolitical crisis resulted in a lasting literati preference for imperial restoration and unified rule.Hilde De Weerdt makes an important intervention in cultural and intellectual history by examining censorship and publicity together. In addition, she reorients the debate about the social transformation and local turn of imperial Chinese elites by treating the formation of localist strategies and empire-focused political identities as parallel rather than opposite trends."

Laws of the Land

Author : Tristan G. Brown
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691246726
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (912 download)

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Book Synopsis Laws of the Land by : Tristan G. Brown

Download or read book Laws of the Land written by Tristan G. Brown and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-05 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking history of fengshui’s roles in public life and law during China’s last imperial dynasty Today the term fengshui, which literally means “wind and water,” is recognized around the world. Yet few know exactly what it means, let alone its fascinating history. In Laws of the Land, Tristan Brown tells the story of the important roles—especially legal ones—played by fengshui in Chinese society during China’s last imperial dynasty, the Manchu Qing (1644–1912). Employing archives from Mainland China and Taiwan that have only recently become available, this is the first book to document fengshui’s invocations in Chinese law during the Qing dynasty. Facing a growing population, dwindling natural resources, and an overburdened rural government, judicial administrators across China grappled with disputes and petitions about fengshui in their efforts to sustain forestry, farming, mining, and city planning. Laws of the Land offers a radically new interpretation of these legal arrangements: they worked. An intelligent, considered, and sustained engagement with fengshui on the ground helped the imperial state keep the peace and maintain its legitimacy, especially during the increasingly turbulent decades of the nineteenth century. As the century came to an end, contentious debates over industrialization swept across the bureaucracy, with fengshui invoked by officials and scholars opposed to the establishment of railways, telegraphs, and foreign-owned mines. Demonstrating that the only way to understand those debates and their profound stakes is to grasp fengshui’s longstanding roles in Chinese public life, Laws of the Land rethinks key issues in the history of Chinese law, politics, science, religion, and economics.

Opportunity in Crisis

Author : Steven B. Miles
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 168417631X
Total Pages : 375 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (841 download)

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Book Synopsis Opportunity in Crisis by : Steven B. Miles

Download or read book Opportunity in Crisis written by Steven B. Miles and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-03-07 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opportunity in Crisis explores the history of late Qing Cantonese migration along the West River basin during war and reconstruction and the impact of those developments on the relationship between state and local elites on the Guangxi frontier. By situating Cantonese upriver and overseas migration within the same framework, Steven Miles reconceives the late Qing as an age of Cantonese diasporic expansion rather than one of state decline. The book opens with crisis: rising levels of violence targeting Cantonese riverine commerce, much of it fomented by a geographically mobile Cantonese underclass. Miles then narrates the ensuing history of a Cantonese rebel regime established in Guangxi in the wake of the Taiping uprising. Subsequent chapters discuss opportunities created by this crisis and its aftermath and demonstrate important continuities and changes across the mid-century divide. With the reassertion of Qing control, Cantonese commercial networks in Guangxi expanded dramatically and became an increasingly important source of state revenue. Through its reliance on Hunanese and Cantonese to reconquer Guangxi, the Qing state allowed these diasporic cohorts more flexibility in colonizing the provincial administration and examination apparatus, helping to recreate a single polity on the eve of China’s transition from empire to nation-state.

The Politics of Higher Education

Author : Chu Ming-kin
Publisher : Hong Kong University Press
ISBN 13 : 988852819X
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (885 download)

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Book Synopsis The Politics of Higher Education by : Chu Ming-kin

Download or read book The Politics of Higher Education written by Chu Ming-kin and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-02 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Politics of Higher Education: The Imperial University in Northern Song China uses the history of the Imperial University of the Northern Song to show the limits of the Song emperors’ powers. At the time, the university played an increasingly dominant role in selecting government officials. This role somehow curtailed the authority of the Song emperors, who did not possess absolute power and, more often than not, found their actions to be constrained by the institution. The nomination mechanism left room for political maneuvering and stakeholders—from emperors to scholar-officials—tried to influence the process. Hence, power struggles among successive emperors trying to assert their imperial authority ensued. Demands for greater autonomy by officials were, for example, unceasing. Chu Ming-kin shows that the road to autocracy was anything but linear. In fact, during the Northern Song dynasty, competition and compromises over diverse agendas constantly altered the political landscape. “The scholarship of this book is exceptionally sound. Chu’s command of both primary and secondary sources is breathtaking in its scope. This will be the standard treatment of Northern Song higher education for many years to come. The pages that describe how the university functioned as a cynical vehicle to facilitate upper class entry into the jinshi system are fascinating and an important contribution to the larger scholarship on Song culture.” —Charles Hartman, University at Albany, State University of New York “This work highlights in arresting detail a heretofore neglected area of higher education under the Northern Song, the Directorate of Higher Education, with particular focus on student activism at the peak of the institution’s political clout. There is nothing comparable either in China or the Western World. The book is ambitious in the use of sources, while nuanced in interpreting them. In sum, it is a work of rare erudition, particularly for a young scholar.” —Richard L. Davis, National Taiwan University

Railroads and the Transformation of China

Author : Elisabeth Köll
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674368177
Total Pages : 417 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (743 download)

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Book Synopsis Railroads and the Transformation of China by : Elisabeth Köll

Download or read book Railroads and the Transformation of China written by Elisabeth Köll and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-14 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To convey modern China’s history and the forces driving its economic success, rail has no equal. From warlordism to Cultural Revolution, railroads suffered the country’s ills but persisted because they were exemplary institutions. Elisabeth Köll shows why they remain essential to the PRC’s technocratic economic model for China’s future.

The Ancient State of Puyŏ in Northeast Asia

Author : Mark E. Byington
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 1684175674
Total Pages : 446 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (841 download)

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Book Synopsis The Ancient State of Puyŏ in Northeast Asia by : Mark E. Byington

Download or read book The Ancient State of Puyŏ in Northeast Asia written by Mark E. Byington and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark E. Byington explores the formation, history, and legacy of the ancient state of Puyŏ, which existed in central Manchuria from the third century BCE until the late fifth century CE. As the earliest archaeologically attested state to arise in northeastern Asia, Puyŏ occupies an important place in the history of that region. Nevertheless, until now its history and culture have been rarely touched upon in scholarly works in any language. The present volume, utilizing recently discovered archaeological materials from Northeast China as well as a wide variety of historical records, explores the social and political processes associated with the formation and development of the Puyŏ state, and discusses how the historical legacy of Puyŏ—its historical memory—contributed to modes of statecraft of later northeast Asian states and provided a basis for a developing historiographical tradition on the Korean peninsula. Byington focuses on two major aspects of state formation: as a social process leading to the formation of a state-level polity called Puyŏ, and as a political process associated with a variety of devices intended to assure the stability and perpetuation of the inegalitarian social structures of several early states in the Korea–Manchuria region.

Shrines to Living Men in the Ming Political Cosmos

Author : Sarah Schneewind
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 1684170990
Total Pages : 382 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (841 download)

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Book Synopsis Shrines to Living Men in the Ming Political Cosmos by : Sarah Schneewind

Download or read book Shrines to Living Men in the Ming Political Cosmos written by Sarah Schneewind and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: """Shrines to Living Men in the Ming Political Cosmos"", the first book focusing on premortem shrines in any era of Chinese history, places the institution at the intersection of politics and religion. When a local official left his post, grateful subjects housed an image of him in a temple, requiting his grace: that was the ideal model. By Ming times, the “living shrine” was legal, old, and justified by readings of the classics.Sarah Schneewind argues that the institution could invite and pressure officials to serve local interests; the policies that had earned a man commemoration were carved into stone beside the shrine. Since everyone recognized that elite men might honor living officials just to further their own careers, premortem shrine rhetoric stressed the role of commoners, who embraced the opportunity by initiating many living shrines. This legitimate, institutionalized political voice for commoners expands a scholarly understanding of “public opinion” in late imperial China, aligning it with the efficacy of deities to create a nascent political conception Schneewind calls the “minor Mandate of Heaven.” Her exploration of premortem shrine theory and practice illuminates Ming thought and politics, including the Donglin Party’s battle with eunuch dictator Wei Zhongxian and Gu Yanwu’s theories."