The Aristocratic Families In Early Imperial China

Author : Patricia Buckley Ebrey
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2009-03-12
Category : History
ISBN : 0521102375

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The Aristocratic Families in Early Imperial China by Patricia Buckley Ebrey Pdf

Much scholarly work has been published on the Chinese medieval 'aristocracy', in Chinese, Japanese and Western languages. It is commonly accepted that the change from an aristocratic society to a 'meritocracy' was one of the turning points of Chinese history. But since almost every aspect of political, economic and cultural history is involved in questions of the nature of the aristocracy, perhaps the only way to test theories of the means by which a small elite preserved its social status and political prestige for seven or eight hundred years is by tracing the fortunes of a single family in great detail. The present work is a fully documented case study of the Ts'uis of Po-ling from the first through the ninth centuries. By observing OW evolution of the Ts'uis as an aristocratic kinship group - and an unusual quantity of rich and original source material was available to Dr Ebrey - the author demonstrates OW fluctuation in aristocratic influence and tic changing basis of such families' prestige and power. Studies such as this are essential to enlarge our knowledge not only of medieval society and politics in China but also the development of family and lineage. In the light of the detailed evidence Dr Ebrey provides, many conventional views many well have to be abandoned.

Author : Patricia Buckley Ebrey
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Aristocracy (Political science)
ISBN : OCLC:848593561

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The Aristocratic Families in Early Imperial China by Patricia Buckley Ebrey Pdf

Author : Patricia Buckley Ebrey,James L. Watson
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 341 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2024-07-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9780520377974

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Kinship Organization in Late Imperial China, 1000-1940 by Patricia Buckley Ebrey,James L. Watson Pdf

One of the most important questions facing scholars of China is how Chinese society is held together. It is now well known that China has been marked by great diversity. In the realm of social customs, not only were there broad regional or class differences, but also, at a local level, the people in one village might adopt a different set of practices from those of neighboring communities. Yet the majority of these varied practices seems to have fit within a frame that was distinctly Chinese. Thus scholars must also ask how people of dissimilar occupations and economic interests, living in widely separated parts of the country, came to recognize and act on a common set of cultural beliefs. Explaining the variations in Chinese society requires minute knowledge of local conditions. Explaining the uniformities requires historical understanding of the processes involved in the spread of ideas and practices and the ways by which some came to be considered standard. Given the available sources on Chinese society, neither of these tasks is simple. The study of kinship and kinship organizations provides one of the best ways to approach the coexisting uniformities and variations of Chinese society. This edited volume is the collaboration of historians and social scientists, and this collaboration is required if we are to learn enough about kinship in Chinese society to explain both the uniformities and the variations. The substantive papers are all written by historians, but these historians have raided the stock of anthropological terms, models, and theories, tried to use technical terms in a consistent and well-defined way, implicitly addressed anthropologists on the issues that seem to fascinate them, and responded to the suggestions and criticisms of the anthropologists who have read their papers. At the same time, however, they remain historians and do not ignore the types of issues (such as historical context and change over time) with which historians have always dealt. The editors believe that this type of collaboration has distinct advantages over the more usual approach to transcending disciplinary boundaries by placing articles by historians and social scientists side by side in the same volume. If we have been successful, social scientists should find issues of interest in the chapters, and historians should find them full of the substance of history and not too long-winded in the belaboring the obvious. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.

Author : Nicolas Tackett
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 301 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2020-10-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9781684170777

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The Destruction of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy by Nicolas Tackett Pdf

Historians have long been perplexed by the complete disappearance of the medieval Chinese aristocracy by the tenth century—the “great clans” that had dominated China for centuries. In this book, Nicolas Tackett resolves the enigma of their disappearance, using new, digital methodologies to analyze a dazzling array of sources. Tackett systematically mines thousands of funerary biographies excavated in recent decades—most of them never before examined by scholars—while taking full advantage of the explanatory power of Geographic Information System (GIS) methods and social network analysis. Tackett supplements these analyses with extensive anecdotes culled from epitaphs, prose literature, and poetry, bringing to life women and men who lived a millennium in the past. The Destruction of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy demonstrates that the great Tang aristocratic families adapted to the social, economic, and institutional transformations of the seventh and eighth centuries far more successfully than previously believed. Their political influence collapsed only after a large number were killed during three decades of extreme violence following Huang Chao’s sack of the capital cities in 880 CE. 2015 James Breasted Prize, American Historical Association

Author : Anthony J. Barbieri-Low
Publisher : University of Washington Press
Page : 401 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2021-10-07
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780295749884

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Artisans in Early Imperial China by Anthony J. Barbieri-Low Pdf

Early China is best known for the dazzling material artifacts it has left behind. These terracotta figures, gilt-bronze lamps, and other material remnants of the Chinese past unearthed by archaeological excavations are often viewed without regard to the social context of their creation, yet they were made by individuals who contributed greatly to the foundations of early Chinese culture. With Artisans in Early Imperial China, Anthony Barbieri-Low combines historical, epigraphic, and archaeological analysis to refocus our gaze from the glittering objects and monuments of China onto the men and women who made them. Taking readers inside the private workshops, crowded marketplaces, and great palaces, temples, and tombs of early China, Barbieri-Low explores the lives and working conditions of artisans, meticulously documenting their role in early Chinese society and the economy. First published in 2007, winner of top prizes from the Association for Asian Studies, American Historical Association, College Art Association, and the International Convention of Asia Scholars, and now back in print, Artisans in Early Imperial China will appeal to anyone interested in Chinese history, as well as to scholars of comparative social history, labor history, and Asian art history.

Author : Charles Sanft
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 278 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2019-05-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781438475134

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Literate Community in Early Imperial China by Charles Sanft Pdf

Through an examination of archaeologically recovered texts from China’s northwestern border regions, argues for widespread interaction with texts in the Han period. This book examines ancient written materials from China’s northwestern border regions to offer fresh insights into the role of text in shaping society and culture during the Han period (206/2 BCE–220 CE). Left behind by military installations, these documents—wooden strips and other nontraditional textual materials such as silk—recorded the lives and activities of military personnel and the people around them. Charles Sanft explores their functions and uses by looking at a fascinating array of material, including posted texts on signaling across distances, practical texts on brewing beer and evaluating swords, and letters exchanged by officials working in low rungs of the bureaucracy. By focusing on all members of the community, he argues that a much broader section of early society had meaningful interactions with text than previously believed. This major shift in interpretation challenges long-standing assumptions about the limited range of influence that text and literacy had on culture and society and makes important contributions to early China studies, the study of literacy, and to the global history of non-elites. “Sanft’s analysis fills out what is still a rather sparse picture of life in non-elite, nonofficial social circles. For the first time ever, we learn how women might have been included in a literate community along the ancient northwestern frontier, and we also learn how soldiers and other members of the uneducated or semiliterate public made use of the extensive knowledge that texts conveyed in their work and lives. None of this information is apparent from traditionally received texts. Sanft therefore does the field a great favor by systematically laying the foundations for a broader understanding of all levels of society, as well as an understanding of how these levels interconnect through systems of knowledge expressed through text.” — Erica Fox Brindley, author of Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern Frontier, c. 400 BCE–50 CE

Author : Patricia Buckley Ebrey
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 285 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2014-07-14
Category : History
ISBN : 9781400862351

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Confucianism and Family Rituals in Imperial China by Patricia Buckley Ebrey Pdf

To explore the historical connections between Confucianism and Chinese society, this book examines the social and cultural processes through which Confucian texts on family rituals were written, circulated, interpreted, and used as guides to action. Weddings, funerals, and ancestral rites were central features of Chinese culture; they gave drama to transitions in people's lives and conveyed conceptions of the hierarchy of society and the interdependency of the living and the dead. Patricia Ebrey's social history of Confucian texts shows much about how Chinese culture was created in a social setting, through the participation of people at all social levels. Books, like Chu Hsi's Family Rituals and its dozens of revisions, were important in forming ritual behavior in China because of the general respect for literature, the early spread of printing, and the absence of an ecclesiastic establishment authorized to rule on the acceptability of variations in ritual behavior. Ebrey shows how more and more of what people commonly did was approved in the liturgies and thus brought into the realm labeled Confucian. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Author : Yuhua Wang
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2022-10-11
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780691237510

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The Rise and Fall of Imperial China by Yuhua Wang Pdf

How social networks shaped the imperial Chinese state China was the world’s leading superpower for almost two millennia, falling behind only in the last two centuries and now rising to dominance again. What factors led to imperial China’s decline? The Rise and Fall of Imperial China offers a systematic look at the Chinese state from the seventh century through to the twentieth. Focusing on how short-lived emperors often ruled a strong state while long-lasting emperors governed a weak one, Yuhua Wang shows why lessons from China’s history can help us better understand state building. Wang argues that Chinese rulers faced a fundamental trade-off that he calls the sovereign’s dilemma: a coherent elite that could collectively strengthen the state could also overthrow the ruler. This dilemma emerged because strengthening state capacity and keeping rulers in power for longer required different social networks in which central elites were embedded. Wang examines how these social networks shaped the Chinese state, and vice versa, and he looks at how the ruler’s pursuit of power by fragmenting the elites became the final culprit for China’s fall. Drawing on more than a thousand years of Chinese history, The Rise and Fall of Imperial China highlights the role of elite social relations in influencing the trajectories of state development.

Author : Chye Kiang Heng
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 1999-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0824819829

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Cities of Aristocrats and Bureaucrats by Chye Kiang Heng Pdf

Describes and examines the structures of the capital cities and major urban centers from the Sui to the Northern Song period. It also provides an in-depth account of the process of transformation from the curfew controlled city of the Tang period to the open city of the Song.

Author : Jo-Shui Chen
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 237 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2006-11-02
Category : History
ISBN : 9780521030106

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Liu Tsung-yüan and Intellectual Change in T'ang China, 773-819 by Jo-Shui Chen Pdf

This study offers an interpretation of the origins of the T'ang-Sung intellectual tradition.

Author : Mark Edward Lewis
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 367 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2009-10-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674265417

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China’s Cosmopolitan Empire by Mark Edward Lewis Pdf

The Tang dynasty is often called China’s “golden age,” a period of commercial, religious, and cultural connections from Korea and Japan to the Persian Gulf, and a time of unsurpassed literary creativity. Mark Lewis captures a dynamic era in which the empire reached its greatest geographical extent under Chinese rule, painting and ceramic arts flourished, women played a major role both as rulers and in the economy, and China produced its finest lyric poets in Wang Wei, Li Bo, and Du Fu. The Chinese engaged in extensive trade on sea and land. Merchants from Inner Asia settled in the capital, while Chinese entrepreneurs set off for the wider world, the beginning of a global diaspora. The emergence of an economically and culturally dominant south that was controlled from a northern capital set a pattern for the rest of Chinese imperial history. Poems celebrated the glories of the capital, meditated on individual loneliness in its midst, and described heroic young men and beautiful women who filled city streets and bars. Despite the romantic aura attached to the Tang, it was not a time of unending peace. In 756, General An Lushan led a revolt that shook the country to its core, weakening the government to such a degree that by the early tenth century, regional warlordism gripped many areas, heralding the decline of the Great Tang.

Author : Walter Scheidel
Publisher : Oxford Studies in Early Empire
Page : 322 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2015
Category : History
ISBN : 9780190202248

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State Power in Ancient China and Rome by Walter Scheidel Pdf

The Chinese and the Romans created the largest empires of the ancient world. Separated by thousands of miles of steppe, mountains and sea, these powerful states developed independently and with very limited awareness of each other's existence. This parallel process of state formation served as a massive natural experiment in social evolution that provides unique insight into the complexities of historical causation. Comparisons between the two empires shed new light on the factors that led to particular outcomes and help us understand similarities and differences in ancient state formation. The explicitly comparative perspective adopted in this volume opens up a dialogue between scholars from different areas of specialization, encouraging them to address big questions about the nature of imperial rule. In a series of interlocking case studies, leading experts of early China and the ancient Mediterranean explore the relationship between rulers and elite groups, the organization and funding of government, and the ways in which urban development reflected the interplay between state power and communal civic institutions.0Bureaucratization, famously associated with Qin and Han China but long less prominent in the Roman world, receives special attention as an index of the ambitions and capabilities of kings and emperors. The volume concludes with a look at the preconditions for the emergence of divine rulership. Taken together, these pioneering contributions lay the foundations for a systematic comparative history of early empires.

Author : John Lagerwey,Marc Kalinowski
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 1280 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2008-10-31
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9789047442424

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Early Chinese Religion, Part One: Shang through Han (1250 BC-220 AD) (2 vols.) by John Lagerwey,Marc Kalinowski Pdf

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).

Author : Cong Ellen Zhang
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2020-09-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780824882754

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Performing Filial Piety in Northern Song China by Cong Ellen Zhang Pdf

Educated men in Song-dynasty China (960–1279) traveled frequently in search of scholarly and bureaucratic success. These extensive periods of physical mobility took them away from their families, homes, and native places for long periods of time, preventing them from fulfilling their most sacred domestic duty: filial piety to their parents. In this deeply grounded work, Ellen Zhang locates the tension between worldly ambition and family duty at the heart of elite social and cultural life. Drawing on more than 2,000 funerary biographies and other official and private writing, Zhang argues that the predicament in which Song literati found themselves diminished neither the importance of filial piety nor the appeal of participating in examinations and government service. On the contrary, the Northern Song witnessed unprecedented literati activity and state involvement in the bolstering of ancient forms of filial performances and the promotion of new ones. The result was the triumph of a new filial ideal: luyang. By labeling highly coveted honors and privileges attainable solely through scholarly and official accomplishments as the most celebrated filial acts, the luyang rhetoric elevated office-holding men to be the most filial of sons. Consequently, the proper performance of filiality became essential to scholar-official identity and self-representation. Zhang convincingly demonstrates that this reconfiguration of elite male filiality transformed filial piety into a status- and gender-based virtue, a change that had wide implications for elite family life and relationships in the Northern Song. The separation of elite men from their parents and homes also made the idea of “native place” increasingly fluid. This development in turn generated an interest in family preservation as filial performance. Individually initiated, kinship- and native place-based projects flourished and coalesced with the moral and cultural visions of leading scholar-intellectuals, providing the social and familial foundations for the ascendancy of Neo-Confucianism as well as new cultural norms that transformed Chinese society in the Song and beyond.

Author : Paul R. Goldin
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2001-10-31
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0824824822

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The Culture of Sex in Ancient China by Paul R. Goldin Pdf

The subject of sex was central to early Chinese thought. Discussed openly and seriously as a fundamental topic of human speculation, it was an important source of imagery and terminology that informed the classical Chinese conception of social and political relationships. This sophisticated and long-standing tradition, however, has been all but neglected by modern historians. In The Culture of Sex in Ancient China, Paul Rakita Goldin addresses central issues in the history of Chinese attitudes toward sex and gender from 500 B.C. to A.D. 400. A survey of major pre-imperial sources, including some of the most revered and influential texts in the Chinese tradition, reveals the use of the image of copulation as a metaphor for various human relations, such as those between a worshiper and his or her deity or a ruler and his subjects. In his examination of early Confucian views of women, Goldin notes that, while contradictions and ambiguities existed in the articulation of these views, women were nevertheless regarded as full participants in the Confucian project of self-transformation. He goes on to show how assumptions concerning the relationship of sexual behavior to political activity (assumptions reinforced by the habitual use of various literary tropes discussed earlier in the book) led to increasing attempts to regulate sexual behavior throughout the Han dynasty. Following the fall of the Han, this ideology was rejected by the aristocracy, who continually resisted claims of sovereignty made by impotent emperors in a succession of short-lived dynasties. Erudite and immensely entertaining, this study of intellectual conceptions of sex and sexuality in China will be welcomed by students and scholars of early China and by those with an interest in the comparative development of ancient cultures.