Ancient City Walls in China

Ancient City Walls in China PDF Author: Guoqing Yang
Publisher: Benteli Verlags
ISBN: 9783716518533
Category : City walls
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A resume of a historical architecture typology, a legacy with a once tremendous importance for the Middle Kingdom.

Ancient City Walls in China

Ancient City Walls in China PDF Author: Guoqing Yang
Publisher: Benteli Verlags
ISBN: 9783716518533
Category : City walls
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A resume of a historical architecture typology, a legacy with a once tremendous importance for the Middle Kingdom.

Daily Life in Ancient China

Daily Life in Ancient China PDF Author: Muzhou Pu
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107021170
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
This book employs textual and archaeological material to reconstruct the various features of daily life in ancient China.

The Chinese State in Ming Society

The Chinese State in Ming Society PDF Author: Timothy Brook
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415345064
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
This unique collection of reworked and heavily illustrated essays, by one of the leading scholars of Chinese history, re-examines the relationship between the present day state and society in China.

Ancient Chinese Warfare

Ancient Chinese Warfare PDF Author: Ralph D. Sawyer
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465023347
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 578

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Book Description
The history of China is a history of warfare. Rarely in its 3,000-year existence has the country not been beset by war, rebellion, or raids. Warfare was a primary source of innovation, social evolution, and material progress in the Legendary Era, Hsia dynasty, and Shang dynasty -- indeed, war was the force that formed the first cohesive Chinese empire, setting China on a trajectory of state building and aggressive activity that continues to this day. In Ancient Chinese Warfare, a preeminent expert on Chinese military history uses recently recovered documents and archaeological findings to construct a comprehensive guide to the developing technologies, strategies, and logistics of ancient Chinese militarism. The result is a definitive look at the tools and methods that won wars and shaped culture in ancient China.

City Walls

City Walls PDF Author: James D. Tracy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521652216
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 732

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Book Description
The essays presented in this volume, first published in 2000, describe a phenomenon so widespread in human time and space that its importance is easily overlooked. City walls shaped the history of warfare; the mobilisation of manpower and resources needed to build them favoured some kinds of polities over others; and their massive strength, appropriately ornamented, created a visual language of authority. Previous collective volumes on the subject have dealt mainly with Europe, but the historians and art historians who collaborate here follow a comparative agenda. The millennial practice of wall building that branched out from the ancient Near East into India, Europe, and North Africa shows continuities and points of contact of which the makers of urban fortifications were scarcely aware; separate traditions in China, sub-Saharan Africa, and North America illustrate universal themes of defensive strategy and the symbolism of power, each time embedded in a distinctive local context.

The Great Wall

The Great Wall PDF Author: Julia Lovell
Publisher: Picador Australia
ISBN: 1741987318
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
In this seminal and controversial debut, Julia Lovell tackles the history of China - and its relationship with the wider world - through the dramatic story of its most famous landmark. Fabled to be 2200 years old and 4300 miles long, the Great Wall seems to make an overwhelmingly confident physical statement about China's age-old sense of itself as an advanced civilisation anxious to draw a line, keeping the "barbarians" at its borders. But behind the Wall's intimidating exterior - and the myths that have built up around it - lies a complex history of China's view of the outside world, and itself. Lovell looks behind the modern mythology of the Great Wall, uncovering a three-thousand-year history far more fragmented, bloody and less illustrious than its crowds of visitors imagine today. The story of the Wall winds through that of the Chinese empire and the frontier policy that defined it. Lovell restores a human dimension to this astonishing structure, writing about the emperors who planned new phases of building, the people who constructed, lived next to and guarded the walls, and the millions who died - of overwork, starvation, cold and battle. The Great Wall is an epic history which explores the conquests and cataclysms of the Chinese empire over the past 3000 years. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand China's past, present and future.

Empires and Walls

Empires and Walls PDF Author: Mohammed Chaichian
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004260668
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
Why do empires build walls and fences? Are they for defensive purposes only, to keep the ‘barbarians’ at the gate; or do they also function as complex offensive military structures to subjugate and control the colonized? Are the colonized subjects also capable of erecting barriers to shield themselves from colonial onslaughts? In Empires and Walls Mohammad A. Chaichian meticulously examines the rise and fall of the walls that are no longer around; as well as impending fate of ‘neo-liberal’ barriers that imperial and colonial powers have erected in the new Millennium. Based on four years of extensive historical and field-based research Chaichian provides compelling evidence that regardless of their rationale and functions, walls always signal the fading power of an empire.

The Great Wall of China

The Great Wall of China PDF Author: Lesley A. DuTemple
Publisher: Twenty-First Century Books
ISBN: 9780822503774
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 88

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Book Description
A history of the building of the various pieces of the Great Wall of China, with details of how the walls were built through the ages.

The Great Wall of China

The Great Wall of China PDF Author: Charles River Editors
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781542768108
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Book Description
*Includes pictures of the Great Wall of China and important people. *Includes ancient accounts and descriptions of the construction of the Great Wall of China. *Includes footnotes and a bibliography for further reading. *Includes a table of contents. "This territory is occupied by wandering tribes of heathen, who eat such people as they can catch, and for this reason no one enters their country or attempts to travel there. I saw nobody in this city who had been to the Great Wall, or who knew anybody who had been there." - Ibn Batuta, Moroccan explorer, c. 1345 The Great Wall of China is perhaps the wonder of the world that has most captured the human imagination, and as the quotes about it indicate, the wall has acquired special significance even outside of China. The places and ways in which it has taken hold vary greatly, but one thing is certain: the Great Wall of China is as amazing as it is mysterious, and it's as mundane as it is magical. Naturally, the Wall has become the most recognizable symbol of China, used for both aggrandizement and criticism. Nationalists see it as a symbol of China's peaceful nature, engineering capability, and historic longevity, while detractors see the Wall as the embodiment of China's backwardness, closed-mindedness, and hubris. While history allots arguments for the claims of each side, both of them are colored by Great Wall mythology and current geopolitical concerns. Though the wall can symbolize all of these things about China, it is important to remember that the many long walls. upon some of which the current landmark was constructed, were put up by specific people for specific purposes. The first step to a more accurate conception of the Wall is getting a better understanding of its name, because "The Great Wall of China" is a misleading label. More accurately, it may be called the "Great Walls of China," for several dynasties beginning early in Chinese history built fortifications of some kind, usually to the north. These constructions were alternately expanded, connected, dismantled, or neglected, depending on the circumstances and preferences of those in charge. In fact, the Chinese name wan li chang cheng gets closer to capturing the true nature of the wall(s). The name literally means 10,000-1/2 kilometers-long-wall, because 10,000 in Chinese is often shorthand for "many." The walls, measured separately and added up, actually span over 21,000 kilometers (13,000 miles), according to a 2007 government survey, a figure that includes all the known walls from all the dynasties without regard to current condition (even walls that have not stood for centuries were included). What this number explains more than anything is that the story of the Great Wall is very complex and closely tied to the whole of Chinese history, so parsing fact from fiction and rumor is tricky. The Great Wall of China: The History of China's Most Famous Landmark comprehensively looks at the history behind the wall and its construction. Along with pictures, you will learn about the Great Wall like never before, in no time at all.

Walls

Walls PDF Author: David Frye
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN: 1501172719
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
“A lively popular history of an oft-overlooked element in the development of human society” (Library Journal)—walls—and a haunting and eye-opening saga that reveals a startling link between what we build and how we live. With esteemed historian David Frye as our raconteur-guide in Walls, which Publishers Weekly praises as “informative, relevant, and thought-provoking,” we journey back to a time before barriers of brick and stone even existed—to an era in which nomadic tribes vied for scarce resources, and each man was bred to a life of struggle. Ultimately, those same men would create edifices of mud, brick, and stone, and with them effectively divide humanity: on one side were those the walls protected; on the other, those the walls kept out. The stars of this narrative are the walls themselves—rising up in places as ancient and exotic as Mesopotamia, Babylon, Greece, China, Rome, Mongolia, Afghanistan, the lower Mississippi, and even Central America. As we journey across time and place, we discover a hidden, thousand-mile-long wall in Asia's steppes; learn of bizarre Spartan rituals; watch Mongol chieftains lead their miles-long hordes; witness the epic siege of Constantinople; chill at the fate of French explorers; marvel at the folly of the Maginot Line; tense at the gathering crisis in Cold War Berlin; gape at Hollywood’s gated royalty; and contemplate the wall mania of our own era. Hailed by Kirkus Reviews as “provocative, well-written, and—with walls rising everywhere on the planet—timely,” Walls gradually reveals the startling ways that barriers have affected our psyches. The questions this book summons are both intriguing and profound: Did walls make civilization possible? And can we live without them? Find out in this masterpiece of historical recovery and preeminent storytelling.