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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.
Empires of coal : fueling China's entry into the modern world order, 1860-1920
From 1868–1872, German geologist Ferdinand von Richthofen went on an expedition to China. His reports on what he found there would transform Western interest in China from the land of porcelain and tea to a repository of immense coal reserves. By the 1890s, European and American powers and the Qing state and local elites battled for control over the rights to these valuable mineral deposits. As coal went from a useful commodity to the essential fuel of industrialization, this vast natural resource would prove integral to the struggle for political control of China.
Geology served both as the handmaiden to European imperialism and the rallying point of Chinese resistance to Western encroachment. In the late nineteenth century both foreign powers and the Chinese viewed control over mineral resources as the key to modernization and industrialization. When the first China Geological Survey began work in the 1910s, conceptions of natural resources had already shifted, and the Qing state expanded its control over mining rights, setting the precedent for the subsequent Republican and People's Republic of China regimes.
In Empires of Coal, Shellen Xiao Wu argues that the changes specific to the late Qing were part of global trends in the nineteenth century, when the rise of science and industrialization destabilized global systems and caused widespread unrest and the toppling of ruling regimes around the world.
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.
Book
Saving lives in wartime China : how medical reformers built modern healthcare systems amid war and epidemics, 1928-1945
This study shows how a small number of medical reformers introduced modern healthcare services between 1928-1945 in China when Chinese people were suffering by the millions from infectious disease, maternal child mortality, and battlefield casualties.
eBook
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