The Destruction Of The Medieval Chinese Aristocracy

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The Destruction of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy

Nicolas Tackett
The Destruction of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy Book PDF

Author : Nicolas Tackett
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 301 pages
File Size : 53,5 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

The Origins of the Chinese Nation

Nicolas Tackett
The Origins of the Chinese Nation Book PDF

Author : Nicolas Tackett
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 349 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2017-11-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9781107196773

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The Origins of the Chinese Nation by Nicolas Tackett Pdf

Nicolas Tackett explores the emergence of a new worldview and sense of Chinese identity during the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127).

Cities of Aristocrats and Bureaucrats

Chye Kiang Heng
Cities of Aristocrats and Bureaucrats Book PDF

Author : Chye Kiang Heng
Publisher : NUS Press
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 1999
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9971692236

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Cities of Aristocrats and Bureaucrats by Chye Kiang Heng Pdf

The emergence of the open city during the 11th century is one of the most dramatic and important changes in Chinese urban history. While the Sui and the early Tang city was controlled and highly disciplined with restricted commercial activity, the late Northern Song city filled with pluralistic streets active round the clock became a new urban paradigm. These cities reflect the respective societies that gave rise to them - one rooted in a strong aristocratic power with a highly hierarchical social structure, and the other shaped by a pluralistic, mercantile society managed by pragmatic professional bureaucrats. This book provides an in-depth account of the process of transformation from the curfewed city of the Tang period to the open city of the Song. It analyses the multidimensional factors that gradually led to the development of an urban culture which in turn helped cement the trend towards the open city with its irregular layout and distinct urban tissue and silhouette.

The Aristocratic Families in Early Imperial China

Patricia Buckley Ebrey
The Aristocratic Families in Early Imperial China Book PDF

Author : Patricia Buckley Ebrey
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 41,7 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.

Women in Tang China

Bret Hinsch
Women in Tang China Book PDF

Author : Bret Hinsch
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2019-11-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9781538134900

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Women in Tang China by Bret Hinsch Pdf

This important book provides the first comprehensive survey of women in China during the Sui and Tang dynasties from the sixth through tenth centuries CE. Bret Hinsch provides rich insight into female life in the medieval era, ranging from political power, wealth, and work to family, religious roles, and virtues. He explores women’s lived experiences but also delves into the subjective side of their emotional life and the ideals they pursued. Deeply researched, the book draws on a wide range of sources, including standard histories, poetry, prose literature, and epigraphic sources such as epitaphs, commemorative religious inscriptions, and Dunhuang documents. Building on the best Western and Japanese scholarship, Hinsch also draws heavily on Chinese scholarship, most of which is unknown outside China. As the first study in English about women in the medieval era, this groundbreaking work will open a new window into Chinese history for Western readers.

One Who Knows Me

Anna Shields
One Who Knows Me Book PDF

Author : Anna Shields
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 376 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2020-10-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9781684170807

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One Who Knows Me by Anna Shields Pdf

The friendships of writers of the mid-Tang era (780s–820s)—between literary giants like Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen, Han Yu and Meng Jiao, Liu Zongyuan and Liu Yuxi—became famous through the many texts they wrote to and about one another. What inspired mid-Tang literati to write about their friendships with such zeal? And how did these writings influence Tang literary culture more broadly? In One Who Knows Me, the first book to delve into friendship in medieval China, Anna M. Shields explores the literature of the mid-Tang to reveal the complex value its writers discovered in friendship—as a rewarding social practice, a rich literary topic, a way to negotiate literati identity, and a path toward self-understanding. Shields traces the evolution of the performance of friendship through a wide range of genres, including letters, prefaces, exchange poetry, and funerary texts, and interweaves elegant translations with close readings of these texts. For mid-Tang literati, writing about friendship became a powerful way to write about oneself and to reflect upon a shared culture. Their texts reveal the ways that friendship intersected the public and private realms of experience and, in the process, reshaped both.

Visions of Kinship in Medieval Europe

Hans Hummer
Visions of Kinship in Medieval Europe Book PDF

Author : Hans Hummer
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2018-04-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9780192518293

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Visions of Kinship in Medieval Europe by Hans Hummer Pdf

What meaning did human kinship possess in a world regulated by Biblical time, committed to the primacy of spiritual relationships, and bound by the sinews of divine love? In the process of exploring this question, Hans Hummer offers a searching re-examination of kinship in Europe between late Roman times and the high middle ages, the period bridging Europe's primitive past and its modern future. Visions of Kinship in Medieval Europe critiques the modernist and Western bio-genealogical and functionalist assumptions that have shaped kinship studies since their inception in the nineteenth century, when Biblical time collapsed and kinship became a signifier of the essential secularity of history and a method for conceptualizing a deep prehistory guided by autogenous human impulses. Hummer argues that this understanding of kinship is fundamentally antagonistic to medieval sentiments and is responsible for the frustrations researchers have encountered as they have tried to identify the famously elusive kin groups of medieval Europe. He delineates an alternative ethnographic approach inspired by recent anthropological work that privileges indigenous expressions of kinship and the interpretive potential of native ontologies. This study reveals that kinship in the middle ages was not biological, primitive, or a regulator of social mechanisms; nor was it traceable by bio-genealogical connections. In the Middle Ages, kinship signified a sociality that flowed from convictions about the divine source of all things and which wove together families, institutions, and divinities into an expansive eschatological vision animated by 'the most righteous principle of love'.

Late Tang China and the World, 750–907 CE

Shao-yun Yang
Late Tang China and the World 750 907 CE Book PDF

Author : Shao-yun Yang
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 145 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2023-05-25
Category : History
ISBN : 9781009397261

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Late Tang China and the World, 750–907 CE by Shao-yun Yang Pdf

In recent decades, the Tang dynasty (618-907) has acquired a reputation as the most 'cosmopolitan' period in Chinese history. The standard narrative also claims that this cosmopolitan openness faded after the An Lushan Rebellion of 755-763, to be replaced by xenophobic hostility toward all things foreign. This Element reassesses the cosmopolitanism-to-xenophobia narrative and presents a more empirically-grounded and nuanced interpretation of the Tang empire's foreign relations after 755.

Historical Dictionary of Medieval China

Victor Cunrui Xiong
Historical Dictionary of Medieval China Book PDF

Author : Victor Cunrui Xiong
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 1007 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2017-04-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9781442276161

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Historical Dictionary of Medieval China by Victor Cunrui Xiong Pdf

The crucial period of Chinese history, 168-979, falls naturally into contrasting phases. The first phase, also known as that of 'early medieval China,' is an age of political decentralization. Following the breakup of the Han empire, China was plunged into civil war and fragmentation and stayed divided for nearly four centuries. The second phase started in 589, during the Sui dynasty, when China was once again brought under a single government. Under the Sui, the bureaucracy was revitalized, the military strengthened, and the taxation system reformed. The fall of the Sui in 618 gave way to the even stronger Tang dynasty, which represents an apogee of traditional Chinese civilization. Inheriting all the great institutions developed under the Sui, the Tang made great achievements in poetry, painting, music, and architecture. The An Lushan rebellion, which also took place during Tang rule, brought about far-reaching changes in the socioeconomic, political, and military arenas. What transpired in the second half of the Tang and the ensuing Five Dynasties provided the foundation for the next age of late imperial China. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Medieval China contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1000 cross-referenced entries on historical figure. It expands on existing thematic entries, and adds a number of new ones with substantial content, including those on nobility, art, architecture, archaeology, economy, agriculture, money, population, cities, literature, historiography, military, religion, Persia, India, Japan, Korea, Arabs, and Byzantium, among others. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about medieval China.

The Rise and Fall of Imperial China

Yuhua Wang
The Rise and Fall of Imperial China Book PDF

Author : Yuhua Wang
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2022-10-11
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780691215167

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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.

Entombed Epigraphy and Commemorative Culture in Early Medieval China

Timothy M. Davis
Entombed Epigraphy and Commemorative Culture in Early Medieval China Book PDF

Author : Timothy M. Davis
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 428 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2015-11-09
Category : History
ISBN : 9789004306424

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Entombed Epigraphy and Commemorative Culture in Early Medieval China by Timothy M. Davis Pdf

In Entombed Epigraphy and Commemorative Culture Timothy M. Davis explains the social, cultural, and religious significance of early medieval muzhiming —one of the most versatile and persistent commemorative forms employed in the elite burials of pre-modern China.

Textual Practices of Literary Training in Medieval China

Christopher M.B. Nugent
Textual Practices of Literary Training in Medieval China Book PDF

Author : Christopher M.B. Nugent
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2023-10-20
Category : History
ISBN : 9789004684881

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Textual Practices of Literary Training in Medieval China by Christopher M.B. Nugent Pdf

Through close examination of a set of educational works discovered among the Dunhuang manuscripts, this book presents new insights into the literary training undertaken by the elite of medieval China. In their contents and structures, these works tell us what parts of the literary and cultural inheritance the elite were expected to learn and how they learned them. The material aspects of these manuscripts—including handwriting, copying errors, and paratextual additions—show how students in Dunhuang used and reproduced them. What emerges is a picture of a literary education that is more diverse in its sources, and also more haphazard, than previously imagined.

An Intellectual History of China, Volume Two

Zhaoguang Ge
An Intellectual History of China Volume Two Book PDF

Author : Zhaoguang Ge
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 380 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2018-06-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9789004281349

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An Intellectual History of China, Volume Two by Zhaoguang Ge Pdf

A history of traditional Chinese knowledge, thought and belief from the seventh through the nineteenth centuries with a new approach that offers a new perspective. It appropriates a wide range of source materials and emphasizes the necessity of understanding ideas and thought in their proper historical contexts. Its analytical narrative focuses on the dialectical interaction between historical background and intellectual thought. While discussing the complex dynamics of interaction among the intellectual thought of elite Chinese scholars, their historical conditions, their canonical texts and the "worlds of general knowledge, thought and belief," it also illuminates the significance of key issues such as the formation of the Chinese world order and its underlying value system, the origins of Chinese cultural identity, foreign influences, and the collapse of the Chinese world order in the 19th century leading toward the revolutionary events of the 20th century.

City of Marvel and Transformation

Linda Rui Feng
City of Marvel and Transformation Book PDF

Author : Linda Rui Feng
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 209 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2015-07-31
Category : History
ISBN : 9780824841065

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City of Marvel and Transformation by Linda Rui Feng Pdf

During the Tang dynasty, the imperial capital of Chang’an (present-day Xi’an) was unrivaled in its monumental scale, with about one million inhabitants dwelling within its walls. It was there that one of the most enduring cultural and political institutions of the empire—the civil service examinations—took shape, bringing an unprecedented influx of literati men to the city seeking recognition and official status by demonstrating their literary talent. To these examination candidates, Chang’an was a megalopolis, career launch pad, and most importantly, cultural paradigm. As a multifaceted lived space, it captured the imaginations of Tang writers, shaped their future aspirations, and left discernible traces in the writings of this period. City of Marvel and Transformation brings this cityscape to life together with the mindscape of its sojourner-writers. By analyzing narratives of experience with a distinctive metropolitan consciousness, it retrieves lost connections between senses of the self and a sense of place. Each chapter takes up one of the powerful shaping forces of Chang’an: its siren call as a destination; the unforeseen nooks and crannies of its urban space; its potential as a “media machine” to broadcast images and reputations; its demimonde—a city within a city where both literary culture and commerce took center stage. Without being limited to any single genre, specific movement, or individual author, the texts examined in this book highlight aspects of Chang’an as a shared and contested space in the collective imagination. They bring to our attention a newly emerged interval of social, existential, and geographical mobility in the lives of educated men, who as aspirants and routine capital-bound travelers learned to negotiate urban space. Both literary study and cultural history, City of Marvel and Transformation goes beyond close readings of text; it also draws productively from research in urban history, anthropology, and studies of space and place, building upon the theoretical frameworks of scholars such as Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, and Victor Turner. It is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship in Chinese studies on the importance of cities and city life. Students and scholars of premodern China will find new ways to understand the collective concerns of the lettered class, as well as new ways to understand literary phenomena that would eventually influence vernacular tales and the Chinese novel. By asking larger questions about how urban sojourns shape subjectivity and perceptions, this book will also attract a wide range of readers interested in studies of personhood, spatial practice, and cities as living cultural systems in flux, both ancient and modern.

Performing Filial Piety in Northern Song China

Cong Ellen Zhang
Performing Filial Piety in Northern Song China Book PDF

Author : Cong Ellen Zhang
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 55,6 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.