Dynamic Interpretation of Early Cities in Ancient China

Dynamic Interpretation of Early Cities in Ancient China PDF Author: Hong Xu
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811623872
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
This book offers an archaeological study on China’s ancient capitals. Using abundant illustrations of ancient capital sites, it verifies the archaeological discoveries with documentary records. The author introduces the dynamical interpretation of each ancient capital to the interpretation of the entire development history of China's ancient capitals. The book points out that for most of the almost 2000 years from the earliest Erlitou (二里头)to the Ye city (邺城), there was an era where ancient capitals didn’t have outer enclosures due to factors such as the strong national power, the military and diplomatic advantage, the complexity of the residents, and the natural conditions. Thus an era of “the huge ancient capitals without guards” lasting for over 1000 years formed. The concept that “China’s ancient capitals don’t have outer enclosures” presented in the book questions the traditional view that “every settlement has walled enclosures”. Combining science with theory, it offers researchers of history a clear understanding of the development process of China’s ancient capitals.

Dynamic Interpretation of Early Cities in Ancient China

Dynamic Interpretation of Early Cities in Ancient China PDF Author: Hong Xu
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811623872
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book offers an archaeological study on China’s ancient capitals. Using abundant illustrations of ancient capital sites, it verifies the archaeological discoveries with documentary records. The author introduces the dynamical interpretation of each ancient capital to the interpretation of the entire development history of China's ancient capitals. The book points out that for most of the almost 2000 years from the earliest Erlitou (二里头)to the Ye city (邺城), there was an era where ancient capitals didn’t have outer enclosures due to factors such as the strong national power, the military and diplomatic advantage, the complexity of the residents, and the natural conditions. Thus an era of “the huge ancient capitals without guards” lasting for over 1000 years formed. The concept that “China’s ancient capitals don’t have outer enclosures” presented in the book questions the traditional view that “every settlement has walled enclosures”. Combining science with theory, it offers researchers of history a clear understanding of the development process of China’s ancient capitals.

Dynamic Interpretation of Early Cities in Ancient China

Dynamic Interpretation of Early Cities in Ancient China PDF Author: Hong Xu
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789811623882
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Improvised City

Improvised City PDF Author: Cole Roskam
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780295744780
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
For nearly one hundred years, Shanghai was an international treaty port in which the extraterritorial rights of foreign governments shaped both architecture and infrastructure, and it merits examination as one of the most complex and influential urban environments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Improvised City illuminates the interplay between the city's commercial nature and the architectural forms and practices designed to manage it in Shanghai's three municipalities: the International Settlement, the French Concession, and the Chinese city. This book probes the relationship between architecture and extraterritoriality in ways that challenge standard narratives of Shanghai's built environment, which are dominated by stylistic analyses of major landmarks. Instead, by considering a wider range of town halls, post offices, municipal offices, war memorials, water works, and consulates, Cole Roskam traces the cultural, economic, political, and spatial negotiations that shaped Shanghai's growth. Improvised City repositions Shanghai within architectural and urban transformations that reshaped the world over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It responds to growing academic interest in the history of modern and contemporary Chinese architecture and urbanism; the ongoing, shifting relationship between sovereignty and space; and the variegated forms of urban exceptionality'such as special economic zones, tax-free trading spheres, and commercial enclaves'that continue to shape cities.

Understanding the Chinese City

Understanding the Chinese City PDF Author: Li Shiqiao
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1473905397
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
This book teaches us to read the contemporary Chinese city. Li Shiqiao deftly crafts a new theory of the Chinese city and the dynamics of urbanization by: exploring the rise of stories of labour, finance and their hierarchies examining how the Chinese city has been shaped by the figuration of the writing system analyzing the continuing importance of the family and its barriers of protection against real and imagined dangers demonstrating how actual structures bring into visual being the networks of safety in personal and family networks. Understanding the Chinese City elegantly traces a thread between ancient Chinese city formations and current urban organizations, revealing hidden continuities that show how instrumental the past has been in forming the present. Rather than becoming obstacles to change, ancient practices have become effective strategies of adaptation under radically new terms.

The Cambridge World History

The Cambridge World History PDF Author: Jerry H. Bentley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521761628
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The era from 1400 to 1800 saw intense biological, commercial, and cultural exchanges, and the creation of global connections on an unprecedented scale. Divided into two books, Volume 6 of the Cambridge World History series considers these critical transformations. The first book examines the material and political foundations of the era, including global considerations of the environment, disease, technology, and cities, along with regional studies of empires in the eastern and western hemispheres, crossroads areas such as the Indian Ocean, Central Asia, and the Caribbean, and sites of competition and conflict, including Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Mediterranean. The second book focuses on patterns of change, examining the expansion of Christianity and Islam, migrations, warfare, and other topics on a global scale, and offering insightful detailed analyses of the Columbian exchange, slavery, silver, trade, entrepreneurs, Asian religions, legal encounters, plantation economies, early industrialism, and the writing of history.

Working, Housing: Urbanizing

Working, Housing: Urbanizing PDF Author: Jennifer Robinson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319451804
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 71

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Book Description
This book presents an incisive outline of the historical development and geography of cities. It focuses on three themes that constitute essential foundations for any understanding of urban form and function. These are: (a) the shifting patterns of urbanization through historical time, (b) the role of cities as centers of production and work in a globalizing world, and (c) the diverse housing and shelter needs of urban populations. The book also explores a number of critical urban problems and the political challenges that they pose. Empirical evidence from urban situations on all five continents is brought into play throughout the discussion.

Early Chinese Religion: Part One: Shang Through Han (1250 BC-220 AD) (2 Vols)

Early Chinese Religion: Part One: Shang Through Han (1250 BC-220 AD) (2 Vols) PDF Author: John Lagerwey
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004168354
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 1281

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Book Description
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).

From House Societies to States

From House Societies to States PDF Author: Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789258634
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
The organization and characteristics of early and ancient states have become the focus of a renewed interest from archaeologists, ancient historians and anthropologists in recent years. On the one hand, neo-evolutionary schemas of political transformation find it difficult to define some of their most basic concepts, such as ‘chiefdom’, ‘complex chiefdom’ and ‘state’, not to mention the transition between them. On the other hand, teleological interpretations based on linear dynamics, from less to increasingly more complex political structures, in successive steps, impose biased and too rigid views on the available evidence. In fact, recent research stresses the existence of other forms of socio-political organization, less vertically integrated and more heterarchical, that proved highly successful and resilient in the long term in tying together social groups. What is more, such forms quite often represented the basic blocks on which states were built and that managed to survive once states collapsed. Finally, nomadic, maritime and mountain populations provide fascinating examples of societies that experienced alternative forms of political organization, sometimes on a seasonal basis. In other cases, their consideration as ‘marginal’ populations that cultivated specialized skills ensured them a certain degree of autonomy when living either within or at the borders of states. This book explores such small-scale socio-political organizations, their potential and the historical trajectories they stimulated. A selection of historical case studies from different regions of the world may help rethink current concepts and views about the emergence and organization of political complexity and the mechanisms that prevented, occasionally, the emergence of solid polities. They may also cast some light over trajectories of historical transformation, still poorly understood as are the limits of effective state power. This book explores the importance of comparative research and long-term historical perspectives to avoid simplistic interpretations, based on the characteristics of modern Western states abusively used retrospectively.

Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea

Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea PDF Author: Petya Andreeva
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1399528548
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Numerous Iron-Age nomadic alliances flourished along the 5000-mile Eurasian steppe route. From Crimea to the Mongolian grassland, nomadic image-making was rooted in metonymically conveyed zoomorphic designs, creating an alternative ecological reality. The nomadic elite nucleus embraced this elaborate image system to construct collective memory in reluctant, diverse political alliances organised around shared geopolitical goals rather than ethnic ties. Largely known by the term "e;animal style"e;, this zoomorphic visual rhetoric became so ubiquitous across the Eurasian steppe network that it transcended border regions and reached the heartland of sedentary empires like China and Persia. This book shows how a shared fluency in animal-style design became a status-defining symbol and a bonding agent in opportunistic nomadic alliances, and was later adopted by their sedentary neighbours to showcase worldliness and control over the "e;Other"e;. In this study of enormous geographical scope, the author raises broader questions about the place of nomadic societies in the art-historical canon.

Bureaucracy and the State in Early China

Bureaucracy and the State in Early China PDF Author: Feng Li
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521884470
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
This ook redefines the bureaucracy of Ancient Chinese society during the Western Zhou period. The analysis is based on inscriptions of royal edicts from the period carved into bronze vessels. The inscriptions clarify the political and social construction of the Western Zhou and the ways in which it exercised its authority.