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Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China
Chinese food is one of the most recognizable and widely consumed cuisines in the world. Almost no town on earth is without a Chinese restaurant of some kind, and Chinese canned, frozen, and preserved foods are available in shops from Nairobi to Quito. But the particulars of Chinese cuisine vary widely from place to place as its major ingredients and techniques have been adapted to local agriculture and taste profiles. To trace the roots of Chinese foodways, one must look back to traditional food systems before the early days of globalization.
Food and Environment in Early and Medieval Chinatraces the development of the food systems that coincided with China's emergence as an empire. Before extensive trade and cultural exchange with Europe was established, Chinese farmers and agriculturalists developed systems that used resources in sustainable and efficient ways, permitting intensive and productive techniques to survive over millennia. Fields, gardens, semiwild lands, managed forests, and specialized agricultural landscapes all became part of an integrated network that produced maximum nutrients with minimal input-though not without some environmental cost. E. N. Anderson examines premodern China's vast, active network of trade and contact, such as the routes from Central Asia to Eurasia and the slow introduction of Western foods and medicines under the Mongol Empire. Bringing together a number of new findings from archaeology, history, and field studies of environmental management,Food and Environment in Early and Medieval Chinaprovides an updated picture of language relationships, cultural innovations, and intercultural exchanges.
eBook
Raising China's revolutionaries : modernizing childhood for cosmopolitan nationalists and liberated comrades, 1920s-1950s
\"Focuses on how childhood was reconstructed in China, and how children were cared for in new ways, from the early Republican period through the first decade of the PRC. During this time, reformers tried to \"modernize\" childhood, using a scientific rationale to justify increased intervention in family life, and leverage it as a fulcrum for social and political change in the country. The Chinese state eventually usurped the authority of these reformers and increased government involvement in child welfare and family life. While some opposed the state using childhood as a tool for economic modernization and political control, child advocates saw China's national salvation project as consistent with their efforts to safeguard children's \"happiness.\" The book therefore shows that this \"sentimentalization\" of childhood could serve multiple purposes: academic scholarship, economic modernization, and political diplomacy\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Problems of Han Administration
China's early emperors must pay their respects to their predecessors in the correct form; the conduct of government and commercial practice depended on a generally accepted system of weights and measures; critics needed a secure means of expressing their views.
eBook
The Great Wall : China against the world : 1000 BC-AD 2000
Lovell looks behind the modern mythology of the Great Wall, uncovering a history far more fragmented and bloody and far less illustrious than its crowds of visitors imagine today. The story of the Wall winds through that of the Chinese empire and the frontier policy that defined it. Lovell restores a human dimension to this astonishing structure, writing about the emperors who planned new phases of building, the people who constructed, lived and guarded the walls, and the millions who dies-of overwork, starvation, cold and battle. The Great Wall is an epic history which explores the conquests and cataclysms of the Chinese empire over the past 3,000 years. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand China's past, present and future.
The Blacks of Premodern China
Premodern Chinese described a great variety of the peoples they encountered as \"black.\" The earliest and most frequent of these encounters were with their Southeast Asian neighbors, specifically the Malayans. But by the midimperial times of the seventh through seventeenth centuries C.E., exposure to peoples from Africa, chiefly slaves arriving from the area of modern Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania, gradually displaced the original Asian \"blacks\" in Chinese consciousness. In The Blacks of Premodern China, Don J. Wyatt presents the previously unexamined story of the earliest Chinese encounters with this succession of peoples they have historically regarded as black.A series of maritime expeditions along the East African coastline during the early fifteenth century is by far the best known and most documented episode in the story of China's premodern interaction with African blacks. Just as their Western contemporaries had, the Chinese aboard the ships that made landfall in Africa encountered peoples whom they frequently classified as savages. Yet their perceptions of the blacks they met there differed markedly from those of earlier observers at home in that there was little choice but to regard the peoples encountered as free.The premodern saga of dealings between Chinese and blacks concludes with the arrival in China of Portuguese and Spanish traders and Italian clerics with their black slaves in tow. In Chinese writings of the time, the presence of the slaves of the Europeans becomes known only through sketchy mentions of black bondservants. Nevertheless, Wyatt argues that the story of these late premodern blacks, laboring anonymously in China under their European masters, is but a more familiar extension of the previously untold story of their ancestors who toiled in Chinese servitude perhaps in excess of a millennium earlier.
eBook
Women in imperial China
\"This clear and accessible text provides a comprehensive survey of women's history in China from the Neolithic period up to the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911\"--Provided by publisher.
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Heroines of the Qing
Heroines of the Qingintroduces an array of Chinese women from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were powerful, active subjects of their own lives and who wrote themselves as the heroines of their exemplary stories. Traditionally, \"exemplary women\" (lienu)-heroic martyrs, chaste widows, and faithful maidens, for example-were written into official dynastic histories for their unrelenting adherence to female virtue by Confucian family standards. However, despite the rich writing traditions about these women, their lives were often distorted by moral and cultural agendas. Binbin Yang, drawing on interdisciplinary sources, shows how they were able to cross boundaries that were typically closed to women-boundaries not only of gender, but also of knowledge, economic power, political engagement, and ritual and cultural authority. Yang closely examines the rhetorical strategies these \"exemplary women\" exploited for self-representation in various writing genres and highlights their skillful negotiation with, and appropriation of, the values of female exemplarity for self-empowerment.
eBook
The everlasting empire
Established in 221 BCE, the Chinese empire lasted for 2,132 years before being replaced by the Republic of China in 1912. During its two millennia, the empire endured internal wars, foreign incursions, alien occupations, and devastating rebellions--yet fundamental institutional, sociopolitical, and cultural features of the empire remained intact.The Everlasting Empiretraces the roots of the Chinese empire's exceptional longevity and unparalleled political durability, and shows how lessons from the imperial past are relevant for China today.
Yuri Pines demonstrates that the empire survived and adjusted to a variety of domestic and external challenges through a peculiar combination of rigid ideological premises and their flexible implementation. The empire's major political actors and neighbors shared its fundamental ideological principles, such as unity under a single monarch--hence, even the empire's strongest domestic and foreign foes adopted the system of imperial rule. Yet details of this rule were constantly negotiated and adjusted. Pines shows how deep tensions between political actors including the emperor, the literati, local elites, and rebellious commoners actually enabled the empire's basic institutional framework to remain critically vital and adaptable to ever-changing sociopolitical circumstances. As contemporary China moves toward a new period of prosperity and power in the twenty-first century, Pines argues that the legacy of the empire may become an increasingly important force in shaping the nation's future trajectory.
eBook