Taxing Heaven S Storehouse

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Taxing Heaven's Storehouse

Paul J. Smith
Taxing Heaven s Storehouse Book PDF

Author : Paul J. Smith
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 516 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2020-10-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9781684170098

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Taxing Heaven's Storehouse by Paul J. Smith Pdf

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.

Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade

Tansen Sen
Buddhism Diplomacy and Trade Book PDF

Author : Tansen Sen
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 327 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2015-09-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9781442254732

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Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade by Tansen Sen Pdf

Relations between China and India underwent a dramatic transformation from Buddhist-dominated to commerce-centered exchanges in the seventh to fifteenth centuries. The unfolding of this transformation, its causes, and wider ramifications are examined in this masterful analysis of the changing patterns of the interaction between the two most important cultural spheres in Asia. Tansen Sen offers a new perspective on Sino-Indian relations during the Tang dynasty (618–907), arguing that the period is notable not only for religious and diplomatic exchanges but also for the process through which China emerged as a center of Buddhist learning, practice, and pilgrimage. Before the seventh century, the Chinese clergy—given the spatial gap between the sacred Buddhist world of India and the peripheral China—suffered from a “borderland complex.” A close look at the evolving practice of relic veneration in China (at Famen Monastery in particular), the exposition of Mount Wutai as an abode of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī, and the propagation of the idea of Maitreya’s descent in China, however, reveals that by the eighth century China had overcome its complex and successfully established a Buddhist realm within its borders. The emergence of China as a center of Buddhism had profound implications on religious interactions between the two countries and is cited by Sen as one of the main causes for the weakening of China’s spiritual attraction toward India. At the same time, the growth of indigenous Chinese Buddhist schools and teachings retrenched the need for doctrinal input from India. A detailed examination of the failure of Buddhist translations produced during the Song dynasty (960–1279), demonstrates that these developments were responsible for the unraveling of religious bonds between the two countries and the termination of the Buddhist phase of Sino-Indian relations. Sen proposes that changes in religious interactions were paralleled by changes in commercial exchanges. For most of the first millennium, trading activities between India and China were closely connected with and sustained through the transmission of Buddhist doctrines. The eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, witnessed dramatic changes in the patterns and structure of mercantile activity between the two countries. Secular bulk and luxury goods replaced Buddhist ritual items, maritime channels replaced the overland Silk Road as the most profitable conduits of commercial exchange, and many of the merchants involved were followers of Islam rather than Buddhism. Moreover, policies to encourage foreign trade instituted by the Chinese government and the Indian kingdoms contributed to the intensification of commercial activity between the two countries and transformed the China-India trading circuit into a key segment of cross-continental commerce.

The Indian Frontier

Jos Gommans
The Indian Frontier Book PDF

Author : Jos Gommans
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 275 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2017-12-22
Category : History
ISBN : 9781351363563

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The Indian Frontier by Jos Gommans Pdf

This omnibus brings together some old and some recent works by Jos Gommans on the warhorse and its impact on medieval and early modern state-formation in South Asia. These studies are based on Gommans’ observation that Indian empires always had to deal with a highly dynamic inner frontier between semi-arid wilderness and settled agriculture. Such inner frontiers could only be bridged by the ongoing movements of Turkish, Afghan, Rajput and other warbands. Like the most spectacular examples of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empires, they all based their power on the exploitation of the most lethal weapon of that time: the warhorse. In discussing the breeding and trading of horses and their role in medieval and early modern South Asian warfare, Gommans also makes some thought-provoking comparisons with Europe and the Middle East. Since the Indian frontier is part of the much larger Eurasian Arid Zone that links the Indian subcontinent to West, Central and East Asia, the final essay explores the connected and entangled history of the Turko-Mongolian warband in the Ottoman and Timurid Empires, Russia and China.

State Power in China, 900-1325

Patricia Buckley Ebrey,Paul Jakov Smith
State Power in China 900 1325 Book PDF

Author : Patricia Buckley Ebrey,Paul Jakov Smith
Publisher : University of Washington Press
Page : 372 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2016-08-25
Category : History
ISBN : 9780295998480

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State Power in China, 900-1325 by Patricia Buckley Ebrey,Paul Jakov Smith Pdf

This collection provides new ways to understand how state power was exercised during the overlapping Liao, Song, Jin, and Yuan dynasties. Through a set of case studies, State Power in China, 900-1325 examines large questions concerning dynastic legitimacy, factional strife, the relationship between the literati and the state, and the value of centralization. How was state power exercised? Why did factional strife periodically become ferocious? Which problems did reformers seek to address? Could subordinate groups resist the state? How did politics shape the sources that survive? The nine essays in this volume explore key elements of state power, ranging from armies, taxes, and imperial patronage to factional struggles, officials’ personal networks, and ways to secure control of conquered territory. Drawing on new sources, research methods, and historical perspectives, the contributors illuminate the institutional side of state power while confronting evidence of instability and change—of ways to gain, lose, or exercise power.

Fir and Empire

Ian M. Miller
Fir and Empire Book PDF

Author : Ian M. Miller
Publisher : University of Washington Press
Page : 297 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2020-06-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780295747347

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Fir and Empire by Ian M. Miller Pdf

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.

Branches of Heaven

John W. Chaffee
Branches of Heaven Book PDF

Author : John W. Chaffee
Publisher : Harvard Univ Asia Center
Page : 492 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 1999
Category : History
ISBN : 0674080491

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Branches of Heaven by John W. Chaffee Pdf

How the Sung created a social and political asset in the imperial clan while neutralizing it as a potential threat is the story of this book."--BOOK JACKET. "In this, the first full-length study of the imperial clan as an institution, John W. Chaffee analyzes its history, its political role, and the lifestyle of its members, focusing on their residence patterns, marriages, and occupations."--BOOK JACKET.

Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China

Patricia Buckley Ebrey,Maggie Bickford
Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China Book PDF

Author : Patricia Buckley Ebrey,Maggie Bickford
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 675 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2020-05-11
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781684174348

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Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China by Patricia Buckley Ebrey,Maggie Bickford Pdf

Huizong was an exceptional emperor who lived through momentous times. A man of many talents, he wrote poetry and created his own distinctive calligraphy style; collected paintings, calligraphies, and antiquities on a large scale; promoted Daoism; and involved himself in the training of court artists, the layout of gardens, and reforms of music and medicine. The quarter century when Huizong ruled is just as fascinating. The greatly enlarged scholar-official class had come into its own but was deeply divided by factional strife. The long struggle between the Chinese state and its northern neighbors entered a new phase when Song proved unable to defend itself against the newly emergent Jurchen state of Jin. Huizong and thousands of members of his family and court were taken captive, and the Song dynasty had to recreate itself in the South.

Traces of Grand Peace

Jaeyoon Song
Traces of Grand Peace Book PDF

Author : Jaeyoon Song
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 453 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2020-10-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9781684170821

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Traces of Grand Peace by Jaeyoon Song Pdf

Since the second century BC the Confucian Classics, endorsed by the successive ruling houses of imperial China, had stood in tension with the statist ideals of “big government.” In Northern Song China (960–1127), a group of reform-minded statesmen and thinkers sought to remove the tension between the two by revisiting the highly controversial classic, the Rituals of Zhou: the administrative blueprint of an archaic bureaucratic state with the six ministries of some 370 offices staffed by close to 94,000 men. With their revisionist approaches, they reinvented it as the constitution of state activism. Most importantly, the reform-councilor Wang Anshi’s (1021–1086) new commentary on the Rituals of Zhou rose to preeminence during the New Policies period (ca. 1068–1125), only to be swept into the dustbin of history afterward. By reconstructing his revisionist exegesis from its partial remains, this book illuminates the interplay between classics, thinkers, and government in statist reform, and explains why the uneasy marriage between classics and state activism had to fail in imperial China.

Contesting the Yellow Dragon

Xiaofei Kang,Donald S. Sutton
Contesting the Yellow Dragon Book PDF

Author : Xiaofei Kang,Donald S. Sutton
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 505 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2016-09-12
Category : History
ISBN : 9789004319233

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Contesting the Yellow Dragon by Xiaofei Kang,Donald S. Sutton Pdf

Xiaofei Kang and Donald Sutton examine a garrison city and a pilgrimage center in the Sino-Tibetan borderland, tracing the dynamic role of religion and ethnicity in state/society relations from the Ming founding through Communist revolution to the age of tourism.

His Stubbornship: Prime Minister Wang Anshi (1021--1086), Reformer and Poet

Jonathan O. Pease
His Stubbornship Prime Minister Wang Anshi 1021 1086 Reformer and Poet Book PDF

Author : Jonathan O. Pease
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 677 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2021-10-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9789004469259

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His Stubbornship: Prime Minister Wang Anshi (1021--1086), Reformer and Poet by Jonathan O. Pease Pdf

China’s most controversial prime minister, path-breaking reformer, and an iconic Song-dynasty poet, Wang Anshi (1021—1086) is fully chronicled in English for the first time in almost a century, with a new emphasis on his luminous late verse.

Scribes of Gastronomy

Isaac Yue,Siufu Tang
Scribes of Gastronomy Book PDF

Author : Isaac Yue,Siufu Tang
Publisher : Hong Kong University Press
Page : 173 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2013-09-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9789888139989

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Scribes of Gastronomy by Isaac Yue,Siufu Tang Pdf

The culture of food and drink occupies a central role in the development of Chinese civilization, and the language of gastronomy has been a vital theme in a range of literary productions. From stanzas on food and wine in the Classics of Poetry to the articulation of refined dining in The Dream of the Red Chamber and Su Shi’s literary recipe for attaining culinary perfection, lavish textual representations help explain the unique appeal of food and its overwhelming cultural significance within Chinese society. These eight essays offer a colorful tour of Chinese gourmands whose work exemplifies the interrelationships of social and literary history surrounding food, with careful explication of such topics as the importance of tea in poetry, “the morality of drunkenness,” and food’s role in objectifying women.

Entangled Itineraries

Pamela H. Smith
Entangled Itineraries Book PDF

Author : Pamela H. Smith
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
Page : 399 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2019-04-16
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780822986706

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Entangled Itineraries by Pamela H. Smith Pdf

Trade flowed across Eurasia, around the Indian Ocean, and over the Mediterranean for millennia, but in the early modern period, larger parts of the globe became connected through these established trade routes. Knowledge, embodied in various people, materials, texts, objects, and practices, also moved and came together along these routes in hubs of exchange where different social and cultural groups intersected and interacted. Entangled Itineraries traces this movement of knowledge across the Eurasian continent from the early years of the Common Era to the nineteenth century, following local goods, techniques, tools, and writings as they traveled and transformed into new material and intellectual objects and ways of knowing. Focusing on nonlinear trajectories of knowledge in motion, this volume follows itineraries that weaved in and out of busy, crowded cosmopolitan cities in China; in the trade hubs of Kucha and Malacca; and in centers of Arabic scholarship, such as Reyy and Baghdad, which resonated in Bursa, Assam, and even as far as southern France. Contributors explore the many ways in which materials, practices, and knowledge systems were transformed and codified as they converged, swelled, at times disappeared, and often reemerged anew.

"Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern"

Ruth Mostern
Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern Book PDF

Author : Ruth Mostern
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 395 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2020-10-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9781684170579

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"Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern" by Ruth Mostern Pdf

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.

The Rise of Fiscal States

Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla,Patrick K. O'Brien,Francisco Comín Comín
The Rise of Fiscal States Book PDF

Author : Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla,Patrick K. O'Brien,Francisco Comín Comín
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 495 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2012-05-24
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781107013513

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The Rise of Fiscal States by Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla,Patrick K. O'Brien,Francisco Comín Comín Pdf

Leading economic historians present a groundbreaking series of country case studies exploring the formation of fiscal states in Eurasia.

Area Bibliography of China

Richard T. Wang
Area Bibliography of China Book PDF

Author : Richard T. Wang
Publisher : Scarecrow Press
Page : 354 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 1997
Category : History
ISBN : 0810833506

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Area Bibliography of China by Richard T. Wang Pdf

A combination of scholarly, commercial, and popular interests has generated a large quantity of literature on every aspect of Chinese life during the past two decades. This bibliography reflects these combined interests; it is broken up into sections by subject headings, and cross-references refer the researcher to related topics.