The Early Chinese Empires

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The Early Chinese Empires

Author : Mark Edward Lewis
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 334 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2010-10-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674265424

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The Early Chinese Empires by Mark Edward Lewis Pdf

In 221 BC, the First Emperor of Qin unified the lands that would become the heart of a Chinese empire. Though forged by conquest, this vast domain depended for its political survival on a fundamental reshaping of Chinese culture. With this informative book, we are present at the creation of an ancient imperial order whose major features would endure for two millennia. The Qin and Han constitute the “classical period” of Chinese history—a role played by the Greeks and Romans in the West. Mark Edward Lewis highlights the key challenges faced by the court officials and scholars who set about governing an empire of such scale and diversity of peoples. He traces the drastic measures taken to transcend, without eliminating, these regional differences: the invention of the emperor as the divine embodiment of the state; the establishment of a common script for communication and a state-sponsored canon for the propagation of Confucian ideals; the flourishing of the great families, whose domination of local society rested on wealth, landholding, and elaborate kinship structures; the demilitarization of the interior; and the impact of non-Chinese warrior-nomads in setting the boundaries of an emerging Chinese identity. The first of a six-volume series on the history of imperial China, The Early Chinese Empires illuminates many formative events in China’s long history of imperialism—events whose residual influence can still be discerned today.

The Early Chinese Empires

Author : Mark Edward Lewis
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 334 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2010-10-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674057340

Get Book

The Early Chinese Empires by Mark Edward Lewis Pdf

In 221 bc the First Emperor of Qin unified the lands that would become the heart of a Chinese empire. Though forged by conquest, this vast domain depended for its political survival on a fundamental reshaping of Chinese culture. With this informative book, we are present at the creation of an ancient imperial order whose major features would endure for two millennia. The Qin and Han constitute the "classical period" of Chinese history--a role played by the Greeks and Romans in the West. Mark Edward Lewis highlights the key challenges faced by the court officials and scholars who set about governing an empire of such scale and diversity of peoples. He traces the drastic measures taken to transcend, without eliminating, these regional differences: the invention of the emperor as the divine embodiment of the state; the establishment of a common script for communication and a state-sponsored canon for the propagation of Confucian ideals; the flourishing of the great families, whose domination of local society rested on wealth, landholding, and elaborate kinship structures; the demilitarization of the interior; and the impact of non-Chinese warrior-nomads in setting the boundaries of an emerging Chinese identity. The first of a six-volume series on the history of imperial China, The Early Chinese Empires illuminates many formative events in China's long history of imperialism--events whose residual influence can still be discerned today.

The Early Chinese Empires

Author : Mark Edward LEWIS
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 335 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2009-06-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674040144

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The Early Chinese Empires by Mark Edward LEWIS Pdf

In 221 B.C. the First Emperor of Qin unified what would become the heart of a Chinese empire whose major features would endure for two millennia. In the first of a six-volume series on the history of imperial China, Lewis highlights the key challenges facing the court officials and scholars who set about governing an empire of such scale and diversity.

Rumor in Early Chinese Empires

Author : Zongli Lu
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 389 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2021-03-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9781108479264

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Rumor in Early Chinese Empires by Zongli Lu Pdf

A major historical study of the formation, spread and impact of rumor in the early Chinese empires.

China Between Empires

Author : Mark Edward Lewis
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 351 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2011-04-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674060357

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China Between Empires by Mark Edward Lewis Pdf

After the collapse of the Han dynasty in the third century CE, China divided along a north-south line. Mark Lewis traces the changes that both underlay and resulted from this split in a period that saw the geographic redefinition of China, more engagement with the outside world, significant changes to family life, developments in the literary and social arenas, and the introduction of new religions. The Yangzi River valley arose as the rice-producing center of the country. Literature moved beyond the court and capital to depict local culture, and newly emerging social spaces included the garden, temple, salon, and country villa. The growth of self-defined genteel families expanded the notion of the elite, moving it away from the traditional great Han families identified mostly by material wealth. Trailing the rebel movements that toppled the Han, the new faiths of Daoism and Buddhism altered every aspect of life, including the state, kinship structures, and the economy. By the time China was reunited by the Sui dynasty in 589 ce, the elite had been drawn into the state order, and imperial power had assumed a more transcendent nature. The Chinese were incorporated into a new world system in which they exchanged goods and ideas with states that shared a common Buddhist religion. The centuries between the Han and the Tang thus had a profound and permanent impact on the Chinese world.

China’s Cosmopolitan Empire

Author : Mark Edward Lewis
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 367 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2009-06-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674033061

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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.

Remaking the Chinese Empire

Author : Yuanchong Wang
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 302 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2018-12-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9781501730511

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Remaking the Chinese Empire by Yuanchong Wang Pdf

Remaking the Chinese Empire examines China’s development from an empire into a modern state through the lens of Sino-Korean political relations during the Qing period. Incorporating Korea into the historical narrative of the Chinese empire, it demonstrates that the Manchu regime used its relations with Chosŏn Korea to establish, legitimize, and consolidate its identity as the civilized center of the world, as a cosmopolitan empire, and as a modern sovereign state. For the Manchu regime and for the Chosŏn Dynasty, the relationship was one of mutual dependence, central to building and maintaining political legitimacy. Yuanchong Wang illuminates how this relationship served as the very model for China’s foreign relations. Ultimately, this precipitated contests, conflicts, and compromises among empires and states in East Asia, Inner Asia, and Southeast Asia – in particular, in the nineteenth century when international law reached the Chinese world. By adopting a long-term and cross-border perspective on high politics at the empire’s core and periphery, Wang revises our understanding of the rise and transformation of the last imperial dynasty of China. His work reveals new insights on the clashes between China’s foreign relations system and its Western counterpart, imperialism and colonialism in the Chinese world, and the formation of modern sovereign states in East Asia. Most significantly, Remaking the Chinese Empire breaks free of the established, national history-oriented paradigm, establishing a new paradigm through which to observe and analyze the Korean impact on the Qing Dynasty.

China's Last Empire

Author : William T. Rowe
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 369 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2010-02-15
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9780674054554

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China's Last Empire by William T. Rowe Pdf

In a brisk revisionist history, William Rowe challenges the standard narrative of Qing China as a decadent, inward-looking state that failed to keep pace with the modern West. This original, thought-provoking history of China's last empire is a must-read for understanding the challenges facing China today.

The Rise of the Chinese Empire: Nation, state, & imperialism in early China, ca. 1600 B.C.-A.D. 8

Author : Chun-shu Chang
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 516 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : China
ISBN : 0472115332

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The Rise of the Chinese Empire: Nation, state, & imperialism in early China, ca. 1600 B.C.-A.D. 8 by Chun-shu Chang Pdf

The second and first centuries B.C. were a critical period in Chinese history—they saw the birth and development of the new Chinese empire and its earliest expansion and acquisition of frontier territories. But for almost two thousand years, because of gaps in the available records, this essential chapter in the history was missing. Fortunately, with the discovery during the last century of about sixty thousand Han-period documents in Central Asia and western China preserved on strips of wood and bamboo, scholars have been able, for the first time, to put together many of the missing pieces. In this first volume of his monumental history, Chun-shu Chang uses these newfound documents to analyze the ways in which political, institutional, social, economic, military, religious, and thought systems developed and changed in the critical period from early China to the Han empire (ca. 1600 B.C. – A.D. 220). In addition to exploring the formation and growth of the Chinese empire and its impact on early nation-building and later territorial expansion, Chang also provides insights into the life and character of critical historical figures such as the First Emperor (221– 210 B.C.) of the Ch’in and Wu-ti (141– 87 B.C.) of the Han, who were the principal agents in redefining China and its relationships with other parts of Asia. As never before, Chang’s study enables an understanding of the origins and development of the concepts of state, nation, nationalism, imperialism, ethnicity, and Chineseness in ancient and early Imperial China, offering the first systematic reconstruction of the history of Chinese acquisition and colonization. Chun-shu Changis Professor of History at the University of Michigan and is the author, with Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang, ofCrisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-Century ChinaandRedefining History: Ghosts, Spirits, and Human Society in P’u Sung-ling’s World, 1640–1715. “An extraordinary survey of the political and administrative history of early imperial China, which makes available a body of evidence and scholarship otherwise inaccessible to English-readers. The underpinning of research is truly stupendous.” —Ray Van Dam, Professor, Department of History, University of Michigan “Powerfully argues from literary and archaeological records that empire, modeled on Han paradigms, has largely defined Chinese civilization ever since.” —Joanna Waley-Cohen, Professor, Department of History, New York University

China's Early Empires

Author : Michael Nylan,Michael Loewe
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 671 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2010-11-04
Category : History
ISBN : 9780521852975

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China's Early Empires by Michael Nylan,Michael Loewe Pdf

Shows how recent archaeological discoveries have enriched our perception of the cultural history of China in the Classical era.

The Troubled Empire

Author : Timothy Brook
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2013-03-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674072534

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The Troubled Empire by Timothy Brook Pdf

The Mongol takeover in the 1270s changed the course of Chinese history. The Confucian empireÑa millennium and a half in the makingÑwas suddenly thrust under foreign occupation. What China had been before its reunification as the Yuan dynasty in 1279 was no longer what it would be in the future. Four centuries later, another wave of steppe invaders would replace the Ming dynasty with yet another foreign occupation. The Troubled Empire explores what happened to China between these two dramatic invasions. If anything defined the complex dynamics of this period, it was changes in the weather. Asia, like Europe, experienced a Little Ice Age, and as temperatures fell in the thirteenth century, Kublai Khan moved south into China. His Yuan dynasty collapsed in less than a century, but Mongol values lived on in Ming institutions. A second blast of cold in the 1630s, combined with drought, was more than the dynasty could stand, and the Ming fell to Manchu invaders. Against this backgroundÑthe first coherent ecological history of China in this periodÑTimothy Brook explores the growth of autocracy, social complexity, and commercialization, paying special attention to ChinaÕs incorporation into the larger South China Sea economy. These changes not only shaped what China would become but contributed to the formation of the early modern world.

Early China

Author : Li Feng
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 369 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2013-12-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780521895521

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Early China by Li Feng Pdf

A critical new interpretation of the early history of Chinese civilization based on the most recent scholarship and archaeological discoveries.

The Construction of Space in Early China

Author : Mark Edward Lewis
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 514 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2012-02-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780791482490

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The Construction of Space in Early China by Mark Edward Lewis Pdf

Shows how the emerging Chinese empire purposely reconceived but was also constrained by basic spatial units such as the body, the household, the region, and the world.

Age of Empires

Author : Zhixin Jason Sun,I-tien Hsing,Cary Y. Liu,Pengliang Lu,Lillian Lan-ying Tseng,Yang Hong,Robin D. S. Yates,Zhonglin Yukina Zhang
Publisher : Metropolitan Museum of Art
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2017-03-27
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781588396174

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Age of Empires by Zhixin Jason Sun,I-tien Hsing,Cary Y. Liu,Pengliang Lu,Lillian Lan-ying Tseng,Yang Hong,Robin D. S. Yates,Zhonglin Yukina Zhang Pdf

Spanning four centuries, from 221 B.C. to A.D. 220, the Qin and Han dynasties were pivotal to Chinese history, establishing the social and cultural underpinnings of China as we know it today. Age of Empires: Art of the Qin and Han Dynasties is a revelatory study of the dawn of China’s imperial age, delving into more than 160 objects that attest to the artistic and cultural flowering that occurred under Qin and Han rule. Before this time, China consisted of seven independent states. They were brought together by Qin Shihuangdi, the self-proclaimed First Emperor of the newly unified realm. Under him, the earliest foundations of the Great Wall were laid, and the Qin army made spectacular advances in the arts of war—an achievement best expressed in the magnificent army of lifesize terracotta warriors and horses that stood before his tomb, seven of which are reproduced here. The Han built on the successes of the Qin, the increasing wealth and refinement of the empire reflected in dazzling bronze and lacquer vessels, ingeniously engineered lamps, and sparkling ornaments of jade and gold from elite Han tombs. But of all the achievements of the Qin-Han era, the most significant is, no doubt, the emergence of a national identity, for it was during this time of unprecedented change that people across the empire began to see themselves as one, with China as their common homeland. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana} With its engaging, authoritative essays and evocative illustrations, Age of Empires provides an invaluable record of a unique epoch in Chinese history, one whose historic and artistic impact continues to resonate into the modern age.

The Collapse of China's Later Han Dynasty, 25-220 CE

Author : Wicky W. K. Tse
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 183 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2018-06-27
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781315532318

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The Collapse of China's Later Han Dynasty, 25-220 CE by Wicky W. K. Tse Pdf

In the Later Han period the region covering the modern provinces of Gansu, southern Ningxia, eastern Qinghai, northern Sichuan, and western Shaanxi, was a porous frontier zone between the Chinese regimes and their Central Asian neighbours, not fully incorporated into the Chinese realm until the first century BCE. Not surprisingly the region had a large concentration of men of martial background, from which a regional culture characterized by warrior spirit and skills prevailed. This military elite was generally honoured by the imperial centre, but during the Later Han period the ascendancy of eastern-based scholar-officials and the consequent increased emphasis on civil values and de-militarization fundamentally transformed the attitude of the imperial state towards the northwestern frontiersmen, leaving them struggling to achieve high political and social status. From the ensuing tensions and resentment followed the capture of the imperial capital by a northwestern military force, the deposing of the emperor and the installation of a new one, which triggered the disintegration of the empire. Based on extensive original research, and combining cultural, military and political history, this book examines fully the forging of military regional identity in the northwest borderlands and the consequences of this for the early Chinese empires.