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"China -- Civilization -- 960-1644"
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Women and the Family in Chinese History
This is a collection of essays by one of the leading scholars of Chinese history, Patricia Buckley. In the essays she has selected for this fascinating volume, Professor Ebrey explores features of the Chinese family, gender and kinship systems as practices and ideas intimately connected to history and therefore subject to change over time. The essays cover topics ranging from dowries and the sale of women into forced concubinary, to the excesses of the imperial harem, excruciating pain of footbinding, and Confucian ideas of womanly virtue. Patricia Ebrey places these sociological analyses of women within the family in an historical context, analysing the development of the wider kinship system. Her work provides an overview of the early modern period, with a specific focus on the Song period (920-1276), a time of marked social and cultural change, and considered to be the beginning of the modern period in Chinese history. With its wide-ranging examination of issues relating to women and the family, this book will be essential reading to scholars of Chinese history and gender studies.
Professor Buckley Ebrey is Professor of History and Chinese Studies at the University of Washington. She has published widely on Chinese history.
Introduction 1. Women, Money, and Class: Sima Guang and neo-Confucian views on women 2. Concubines in Song China 3. Shifts in Marriage Finance: The sixth through thirteenth centuries 4. The Women in Liu Kezhuang's Family 5. The Early Stages of the Development of Descent Group Organization 6. Cremation in Song China 7. Surnames and Han Chinese Identity 8. Rethinking the Imperial Harem: Why were there so many women? 9. Gender and Sinology: Shifts in Western interpretations of footbinding, 1300-1890
eBook
The Way of the Barbarians
Shao-yun Yang challenges assumptions that the cultural and socioeconomic watershed of the Tang-Song transition (800-1127 CE) was marked by a xenophobic or nationalist hardening of ethnocultural boundaries in response to growing foreign threats. In that period, reinterpretations of Chineseness and its supposed antithesis, \"barbarism,\" were not straightforward products of political change but had their own developmental logic based in two interrelated intellectual shifts among the literati elite: the emergence of Confucian ideological and intellectual orthodoxy and the rise of neo-Confucian (daoxue) philosophy. New discourses emphasized the fluidity of the Chinese-barbarian dichotomy, subverting the centrality of cultural or ritual practices to Chinese identity and redefining the essence of Chinese civilization and its purported superiority. The key issues at stake concerned the acceptability of intellectual pluralism in a Chinese society and the importance of Confucian moral values to the integrity and continuity of the Chinese state. Through close reading of the contexts and changing geopolitical realities in which new interpretations of identity emerged, this intellectual history engages with ongoing debates over relevance of the concepts of culture, nation, and ethnicity to premodern China.
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The origins of the Chinese nation : Song China and the forging of an East Asian world order
\"In this major new study, Nicolas Tackett proposes that the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127) witnessed both the maturation of an East Asian inter-state system and the emergence of a new worldview and sense of Chinese identity among educated elites. These developments together had sweeping repercussions for the course of Chinese history, while also demonstrating that there has existed in world history a viable alternative to the modern system of nation-states. Utilizing a wide array of historical, literary, and archaeological sources, chapters focus on diplomatic sociability, cosmopolitan travel, military strategy, border demarcation, ethnic consciousness, and the cultural geography of Northeast Asia. In this ... new approach to the history of the East Asian inter-state system, Tackett argues for a concrete example of a premodern nationalism, explores the development of this nationalism, and treats modern nationalism as just one iteration of a phenomenon with a much longer history.\"--Provided by publisher.
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The way of the barbarians : redrawing ethnic boundaries in Tang and Song China
Shao-yun Yang challenges assumptions that the cultural and socioeconomic watershed of the Tang-Song transition (800-1127 CE) was marked by a xenophobic or nationalist hardening of ethnocultural boundaries in response to growing foreign threats. In that period, reinterpretations of Chineseness and its supposed antithesis, \"barbarism,\" were not straightforward products of political change but had their own developmental logic based in two interrelated intellectual shifts among the literati elite: the emergence of Confucian ideological and intellectual orthodoxy and the rise of neo-Confucian (daoxue) philosophy. New discourses emphasized the fluidity of the Chinese-barbarian dichotomy, subverting the centrality of cultural or ritual practices to Chinese identity and redefining the essence of Chinese civilization and its purported superiority. The key issues at stake concerned the acceptability of intellectual pluralism in a Chinese society and the importance of Confucian moral values to the integrity and continuity of the Chinese state. Through close reading of the contexts and changing geopolitical realities in which new interpretations of identity emerged, this intellectual history engages with ongoing debates over relevance of the concepts of culture, nation, and ethnicity to premodern China.
eBook
Just a song : Chinese lyrics from the eleventh and early twelfth centuries
\"Analyzes the transformation of song lyric (ci), a form of Chinese poetry, from performance contribution to a full literary genre. Examines its discursive contrast to older classical poetry, as well as its emphasis on sensibility, which was lost in the new Song world of righteousness and public advancement\"--Provided by publisher.
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Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds
Long before Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope en route to India, the peoples of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia engaged in vigorous cross-cultural exchanges across the Indian Ocean. This book focuses on the years 700 to 1500, a period when powerful dynasties governed both regions, to document the relationship between the Islamic and Chinese worlds before the arrival of the Europeans. Through a close analysis of the maps, geographic accounts, and travelogues compiled by both Chinese and Islamic writers, the book traces the development of major contacts between people in China and the Islamic world and explores their interactions on matters as varied as diplomacy, commerce, mutual understanding, world geography, navigation, shipbuilding, and scientific exploration. When the Mongols ruled both China and Iran in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, their geographic understanding of each other's society increased markedly. This rich, engaging, and pioneering study offers glimpses into the worlds of Asian geographers and mapmakers, whose accumulated wisdom underpinned the celebrated voyages of European explorers like Vasco da Gama.
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The way of the barbarians : redrawing ethnic boundaries in Tang and Song China
\"The Way of the Barbarians examines a critical period in the development of conceptions of Chinese identity and of foreignness. After tracing thought about culture, customs, ritual, and ethnicity to BCE classical texts, Shao-yun Yang focuses on the meaning and boundaries of Chineseness during the Tang (618-907 CE) and Song (960-1276 CE) dynasties. This period is widely seen as a watershed during which Chinese society was transformed in fundamental ways by population growth, commercialization, urbanization, technological advances, the decline of the long-dominant 'great clan' elite, and the rise of a new literati elite via the greatly expanded civil service examination system. Accompanying shifts occurred in how the Chinese defined themselves as a people and understood their relationship to the rest of the world. Previous scholarship has postulated a ninth-century shift from a spirit of cosmopolitanism--which identified foreign peoples as 'barbarians' who were morally and culturally inferior but who could become Chinese through a 'civilizing' process of acculturation--to one of ostracism. Another view identifies a twelfth-century shift from a traditional notion of culturalism to a new Chinese nationalism, which considered foreigners to be immutably and dangerously 'other' and called for their exclusion from the Chinese world, by force if necessary. This carefully argued intellectual history challenges previous thinking regarding the balance between culture, nation, and race in premodern Chinese identity and engages with ongoing debates over the applicability and relevance of the concept of ethnicity to premodern China\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia
In the thirteenth century, the Mongols created a vast transcontinental empire that functioned as a cultural 'clearing house' for the Old World. Under Mongol auspices various commodities, ideologies and technologies were disseminated across Eurasia. The focus of this path-breaking study is the extensive exchanges between Iran and China. The Mongol rulers of these two ancient civilizations 'shared' the cultural resources of their realms with one another. The result was a lively traffic in specialist personnel and scholarly literature between East and West. These exchanges ranged from cartography to printing, from agriculture to astronomy. The book concludes by asking why the Mongols made such heavy use of sedentary scholars and specialists in the elaboration of their court culture and why they initiated so many exchanges across Eurasia. This is a work of great erudition which crosses new scholarly boundaries in its analysis of communication and culture in the Mongol empire.
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