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Author : George William Skinner
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 820 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : Cities and towns
ISBN : OCLC:1184193921
Author : Hugh D. R. Baker
Publisher : Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press
Page : 854 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 1977
Category : China
ISBN : STANFORD:36105003231441
Author : Linda Cooke Johnson
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 332 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 1993-07-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781438407982
This book examines cities of the Jiangnan region of south-central China between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries, an area considered to be the model of a successfully developing regional economy. The six studies focus on the urban centers of Suzhou, Hangzhou, Yangzhou, and Shanghai. Emphasizing the regional focus, the authors explore the interconnections and sequential relationships between these major cities and analyze common themes such as the development of handicraft industry, transport and commerce, class structure, ethnic diversity and internal immigration, and the social and political pressures generated by developments in manufacturing, taxes, and government politics. The book provides a valuable resource on commercial development and internal economic and social development in pre-modern China, particularly on specific regional development and the historical role of traditional Chinese cities.
Author : David Shambaugh
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2000-05-08
Category : History
ISBN : 0521776031
Publisher Description
Author : Cynthia J. Brokaw,Kai-Wing Chow
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 559 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2005-03-07
Category : History
ISBN : 9780520231269
"A very useful book on a topic of growing importance and interest. Brokaw's introduction is one of the most valuable and best-written prefaces to an edited volume that I have encountered in some time."—Kent Guy, author of The Emperor's Four Treasures
Author : Robert E. Hegel,Katherine N. Carlitz
Publisher : University of Washington Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2017-08-24
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780295997544
In this fascinating, multidisciplinary volume, scholars of Chinese history, law, literature, and religions explore the intersections of legal practice with writing in many different social contexts. They consider the overlapping concerns of legal culture and the arts of crafting persuasive texts in a range of documents including crime reports, legislation, novels, prayers, and law suits. Their focus is the late Ming and Qing periods (c. 1550-1911); their documents range from plaints filed at the local level by commoners, through various texts produced by the well-to-do, to the legal opinions penned by China's emperors. Writing and Law in Late Imperial China explores works of crime-case fiction, judicial handbooks for magistrates and legal secretaries, popular attitudes toward clergy and merchants as reflected in legal plaints, and the belief in a parallel, otherworldly judicial system that supports earthly justice.
Author : Benjamin A. Elman
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 418 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2013-11-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674726932
During China's late imperial period (roughly 1400-1900 CE), men would gather by the millions every two or three years outside official examination compounds sprinkled across China. Only one percent of candidates would complete the academic regimen that would earn them a post in the administrative bureaucracy. Civil Examinations assesses the role of education, examination, and China's civil service in fostering the world's first professional class based on demonstrated knowledge and skill. While millions of men dreamed of the worldly advancement an imperial education promised, many more wondered what went on inside the prestigious walled-off examination compounds. As Benjamin A. Elman reveals, what occurred was the weaving of a complex social web. Civil examinations had been instituted in China as early as the seventh century CE, but in the Ming and Qing eras they were the nexus linking the intellectual, political, and economic life of imperial China. Local elites and members of the court sought to influence how the government regulated the classical curriculum and selected civil officials. As a guarantor of educational merit, civil examinations served to tie the dynasty to the privileged gentry and literati classes--both ideologically and institutionally. China did away with its classical examination system in 1905. But this carefully balanced and constantly contested piece of social engineering, worked out over the course of centuries, was an early harbinger of the meritocratic regime of college boards and other entrance exams that undergirds higher education in much of the world today.
Author : Martin W. Huang
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 370 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2020-03-23
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781684173570
"In this new study of desire in Late Imperial China, Martin Huang argues that the development of traditional Chinese fiction as a narrative genre was closely related to changes in conceptions of the fundamental nature of desire. He further suggests that the rise of vernacular fiction during the late Ming dynasty should be studied in the context of contemporary debates on desire, along with the new and complex views that emerged from those debates.Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China shows that the obsession of authors with individual desire is an essential quality that defines traditional Chinese fiction as a narrative genre. Thus the maturation of the genre can best be appreciated in terms of its increasingly sophisticated exploration of the phenomenon of desire."
Author : Shang Wei
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 374 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2020-10-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9781684170432
Rulin waishi (The Unofficial History of the Scholars) is more than a landmark in the history of the Chinese novel. This eighteenth-century work, which was deeply embedded in the intellectual and literary discourses of its time, challenges the reader to come to grips with the mid-Qing debates over ritual and ritualism, and the construction of history, narrative, and lyricism. Wu Jingzi’s (1701–54) ironic portrait of literati life was unprecedented in its comprehensive treatment of the degeneration of mores, the predicaments of official institutions, and the Confucian elite’s futile struggle to reassert moral and cultural authority. Like many of his fellow literati, Wu found the vernacular novel an expressive and malleable medium for discussing elite concerns. Through a close reading of Rulin waishi, Shang Wei seeks to answer such questions as What accounts for the literati’s enthusiasm for writing and reading novels? Does this enthusiasm bespeak a conscious effort to develop a community of critical discourse outside the official world? Why did literati authors eschew publication? What are the bases for their social and cultural criticisms? How far do their criticisms go, given the authors’ alleged Confucianism? And if literati authors were interested solely in recovering moral and cultural hegemony for their class, how can we explain the irony found in their works?
Author : Benjamin A. Elman
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 900 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2000-03-22
Category : History
ISBN : 052092147X
In this multidimensional analysis, Benjamin A. Elman uses over a thousand newly available examination records from the Yuan, Ming, and Ch'ing dynasties, 1315-1904, to explore the social, political, and cultural dimensions of the civil examination system, one of the most important institutions in Chinese history. For over five hundred years, the most important positions within the dynastic government were usually filled through these difficult examinations, and every other year some one to two million people from all levels of society attempted them. Covering the late imperial system from its inception to its demise, Elman revises our previous understanding of how the system actually worked, including its political and cultural machinery, the unforeseen consequences when it was unceremoniously scrapped by modernist reformers, and its long-term historical legacy. He argues that the Ming-Ch'ing civil examinations from 1370 to 1904 represented a substantial break with T'ang-Sung dynasty literary examinations from 650 to 1250. Late imperial examinations also made "Tao Learning," Neo-Confucian learning, the dynastic orthodoxy in official life and in literati culture. The intersections between elite social life, popular culture, and religion that are also considered reveal the full scope of the examination process throughout the late empire.
Author : Patricia Buckley Ebrey,James L. Watson
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 341 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2024-07-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9780520377974
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 : Man Bun Kwan
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 249 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2001-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780824865009
For nearly four hundred years the Changlu salt merchants played a leading role in the urbanization, commercial development, and social change of the city of Tianjin. As early as the fifteenth century, this small yet important group of citizens negotiated with the state as revenue-farmers, developing and defending their businesses and customs while evolving their own urban culture. In this the first detailed study in English of the mercantile activities and social role of Tianjin's salt merchants, Kwan Man Bun reveals how they helped stabilize the city and assumed many civic responsibilities, providing relief, charities, and other services to their fellow citizenry. Although these developments resemble the emergence of an idealized "public sphere" as in Europe, Kwan makes clear that Tianjin's social changes were not grounded on "rational discourse" but rather drew their strength and continuity from merchant networks based on exclusivity, wealth, education, and kinship.
Author : Ann Waltner
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 249 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2019-03-31
Category : History
ISBN : 9780824879952
The need for heirs in any traditional society is a compelling one. In traditional China, where inheritance and notions of filiality depended on the production of progeny, the need was nearly absolute. As Ann Waltner makes clear in this broadly researched study of adoption in the late Ming and early Ch'ing periods, the getting of an heir was a complex, even paradoxical undertaking. Although adoption involving persons of the same surname was the only arrangement ritually and legally sanctioned in Chinese society, adoption of persons of a different surname was a relatively common practice. Using medical and ritual texts, legal codes, local gazetteers, biography, and fiction, Waltner examines the multiple dimensions of the practice of adoption and identifies not only the dominant ideology prohibiting adoption across surname lines, but also a parallel discourse justifying the practice.
Author : James L. Watson,Evelyn Sakakida Rawski
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 362 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 1988
Category : Family & Relationships
ISBN : 0520060814
During the late imperial era (1500-1911), China, though divided by ethnic, linguistic, and regional differences at least as great as those prevailing in Europe, enjoyed a remarkable solidarity. What held Chinese society together for so many centuries? Some scholars have pointed to the institutional control over the written word as instrumental in promoting cultural homogenization; others, the manipulation of the performing arts. This volume, comprised of essays by both anthropologists and historians, furthers this important discussion by examining the role of death rituals in the unification of Chinese culture.
Author : Benjamin A. Elman
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 890 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2000-03-22
Category : History
ISBN : 9780520215092
"A very important study of one of the most important institutions in Chinese history, one without which the China we have today would certainly be a vastly different place."—Peter Bol, author of "This Culture of Ours": Intellectual Transitions in T'ang and Sung China