The End of the Chinese ‘Middle Ages’

The End of the Chinese ‘Middle Ages’ PDF Author: Stephen Owen
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804726672
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Om poesi og anden kinesisk litteratur fra midten af Tang-dynastiet (618-906)

The End of the Chinese ‘Middle Ages’

The End of the Chinese ‘Middle Ages’ PDF Author: Stephen Owen
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804726672
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Om poesi og anden kinesisk litteratur fra midten af Tang-dynastiet (618-906)

Women in Early Medieval China

Women in Early Medieval China PDF Author: Bret Hinsch
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538117975
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
This important study provides the only comprehensive survey of Chinese women during the early medieval period of disunion, which lasted from the fall of the Eastern Han dynasty in 220 AD to the reunification of China by the Sui dynasty in 581 AD, also known as the Six Dynasties. Bret Hinsch offers rich descriptions of the most important aspects of female life in this era, including family and marriage, motherhood, political power, work, inheritance, education, and religious roles. He traces women’s lived experiences as well as the emotional life and the ideals they pursued. Building on the best Western and Japanese scholarship, Hinsch also draws heavily on Chinese primary sources and scholarship, most of which is unknown outside China. As the first study in English about women in the early medieval era, this groundbreaking book will open a new window into Chinese history for Western readers.

Medieval Chinese Warfare 300-900

Medieval Chinese Warfare 300-900 PDF Author: David Graff
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134553536
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Shortly after 300 AD, barbarian invaders from Inner Asia toppled China's Western Jin dynasty, leaving the country divided and at war for several centuries. Despite this, the empire gradually formed a unified imperial order. Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900 explores the military strategies, institutions and wars that reconstructed the Chinese empire that has survived into modern times. Drawing on classical Chinese sources and the best modern scholarship from China and Japan, David A. Graff connects military affairs with political and social developments to show how China's history was shaped by war.

Rhetoric in Ancient China, Fifth to Third Century B.C.E

Rhetoric in Ancient China, Fifth to Third Century B.C.E PDF Author: Xing Lu
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1643362909
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Xing Lu examines language, art, persuasion, and argumentation in ancient China and offers a detailed and authentic account of ancient Chinese rhetorical theories and practices within the society's philosophical, political, cultural, and linguistic contexts. She focuses on the works of five schools of thought and ten well-known Chinese thinkers from Confucius to Han Feizi to the the Later Mohists. Lu identifies seven key Chinese terms pertaining to speech, language, persuasion, and argumentation as they appeared in these original texts, selecting ming bian as the linchpin for the Chinese conceptual term of rhetorical studies. Lu compares Chinese rhetorical perspectives with those of the ancient Greeks, illustrating that the Greeks and the Chinese shared a view of rhetoric as an ethical enterprise and of speech as a rational and psychological activity. The two traditions differed, however, in their rhetorical education, sense of rationality, perceptions of the role of language, approach to the treatment and study of rhetoric, and expression of emotions. Lu also links ancient Chinese rhetorical perspectives with contemporary Chinese interpersonal and political communication behavior and offers suggestions for a multicultural rhetoric that recognizes both culturally specific and transcultural elements of human communication.

Visual and Material Cultures in Middle Period China

Visual and Material Cultures in Middle Period China PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004349375
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Eight studies examine key features of Chinese visual and material cultures, ranging from tomb design, metalware, ceramic pillows, and bronze mirrors, to printed illustrations, calligraphic rubbings, colophons, and paintings on Buddhist, landscape, and narrative themes. Questions addressed include how artists and artisans made their works, the ways both popular literature and market forces could shape ways of looking, and how practices and imagery spread across regions. The authors connect visual materials to funeral and religious practices, drama, poetry, literati life, travel, and trade, showing ways visual images and practices reflected, adapted to, and reproduced the culture and society around them. Readers will gain a stronger appreciation of the richness of the visual and material cultures of Middle Period China.

Early Medieval China

Early Medieval China PDF Author: Wendy Swartz
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231531001
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 745

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Book Description
This innovative sourcebook builds a dynamic understanding of China's early medieval period (220–589) through an original selection and arrangement of literary, historical, religious, and critical texts. A tumultuous and formative era, these centuries saw the longest stretch of political fragmentation in China's imperial history, resulting in new ethnic configurations, the rise of powerful clans, and a pervasive divide between north and south. Deploying thematic categories, the editors sketch the period in a novel way for students and, by featuring many texts translated into English for the first time, recast the era for specialists. Thematic topics include regional definitions and tensions, governing mechanisms and social reality, ideas of self and other, relations with the unseen world, everyday life, and cultural concepts. Within each section, the editors and translators introduce the selected texts and provide critical commentary on their historical significance, along with suggestions for further reading and research.

Asia in Western and World History

Asia in Western and World History PDF Author: Ainslie Thomas Embree
Publisher: M.E. Sharpe
ISBN: 9781563242656
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 1048

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Book Description
This comprehensive volume provides teachers and students with broad and stimulating perspectives on Asian history and its place in world and Western history. Essays by over forty leading scholars suggest many new ways of incorporating Asian history, from ancient to modern times, into core curriculum history courses. Now featuring "Suggested Resources for Maps to Be Used in Conjunction with Asia in Western and World History".

Monks of Kublai Khan, Emperor of China

Monks of Kublai Khan, Emperor of China PDF Author: Rabban Sawma
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755627946
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Towards the end of the thirteenth century the Nestorian monk, Rabban Sawma, together with his disciple Mark, set out from Khanbaliq (Beijing), the capital city of Kublai Khan's Mongol Empire, on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Travelling through northern China and Central Asia they arrived at Maraghah, capital city of the Ilkhanate that was Mongol-ruled Persia. Military unrest prevented them from ever reaching Jerusalem but they did reah Baghdad, where Rabban Sawma spent many years. Summoned by Arghun Khan, the Ilkhan ruler and grand nephew of Kublai Khan, Sawma was made Ilkhanid ambassador and sent to Europe, first travelling to Constantinople to meet the Byzantine emperor and then to meet the kings of France and England as well as Pope Nicholas IV. Sawma's disciple, Mark, became the Nestorian Catholicus. Sawma's account of his travels provides unique information on the Ilkhans of Perisa and their dealings with the Mongol Christians as well as the events that led to the downfall of the Nestorian Church in China and further offers a unique picture of Medieval Europe through Asian eyes. Translated by Sir E.A. Wallis Budge, who also included a substantial introduction, the work is now rare. This edition contains a new introduction by Professor David Morgan, the leading scholar of the Mongol period.

The Pattern of the Chinese Past

The Pattern of the Chinese Past PDF Author: Mark Elvin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804708760
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
A satisfactory comprehensive history of the social and economic development of pre-modern China, the largest country in the world in terms of population, and with a documentary record covering three millennia, is still far from possible. The present work is only an attempt to disengage the major themes that seem to be of relevance to our understanding of China today. In particular, this volume studies three questions. Why did the Chinese Empire stay together when the Roman Empire, and every other empire of antiquity of the middle ages, ultimately collapsed? What were the causes of the medieval revolution which made the Chinese economy after about 1100 the most advanced in the world? And why did China after about 1350 fail to maintain her earlier pace of technological advance while still, in many respects, advancing economically? The three sections of the book deal with these problems in turn but the division of a subject matter is to some extent only one of convenience. These topics are so interrelated that, in the last analysis, none of them can be considered in isolation from the others.

Catastrophe

Catastrophe PDF Author: David Keys
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345444361
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
It was a catastrophe without precedent in recorded history: for months on end, starting in A.D. 535, a strange, dusky haze robbed much of the earth of normal sunlight. Crops failed in Asia and the Middle East as global weather patterns radically altered. Bubonic plague, exploding out of Africa, wiped out entire populations in Europe. Flood and drought brought ancient cultures to the brink of collapse. In a matter of decades, the old order died and a new world—essentially the modern world as we know it today—began to emerge. In this fascinating, groundbreaking, totally accessible book, archaeological journalist David Keys dramatically reconstructs the global chain of revolutions that began in the catastrophe of A.D. 535, then offers a definitive explanation of how and why this cataclysm occurred on that momentous day centuries ago. The Roman Empire, the greatest power in Europe and the Middle East for centuries, lost half its territory in the century following the catastrophe. During the exact same period, the ancient southern Chinese state, weakened by economic turmoil, succumbed to invaders from the north, and a single unified China was born. Meanwhile, as restless tribes swept down from the central Asian steppes, a new religion known as Islam spread through the Middle East. As Keys demonstrates with compelling originality and authoritative research, these were not isolated upheavals but linked events arising from the same cause and rippling around the world like an enormous tidal wave. Keys's narrative circles the globe as he identifies the eerie fallout from the months of darkness: unprecedented drought in Central America, a strange yellow dust drifting like snow over eastern Asia, prolonged famine, and the hideous pandemic of the bubonic plague. With a superb command of ancient literatures and historical records, Keys makes hitherto unrecognized connections between the "wasteland" that overspread the British countryside and the fall of the great pyramid-building Teotihuacan civilization in Mexico, between a little-known "Jewish empire" in Eastern Europe and the rise of the Japanese nation-state, between storms in France and pestilence in Ireland. In the book's final chapters, Keys delves into the mystery at the heart of this global catastrophe: Why did it happen? The answer, at once surprising and definitive, holds chilling implications for our own precarious geopolitical future. Wide-ranging in its scholarship, written with flair and passion, filled with original insights, Catastrophe is a superb synthesis of history, science, and cultural interpretation.