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This is the first complete study of China's most popular eighteenth-century poet in any Western language. The work consists of a detailed biography, a study of Yuan's revolutionary reinterpretation of Chinese literary theory, and an analysis of his many contributions to the more original genres of Qing-dynasty (1644-1911) poetry such as narrative, historical, didactic, eccentric, and nature verse. The study is concluded by a generous and representative sampling of Yuan's poetry in translation, the first to do justice to the wide variety and richness of his oeuvre. Although many shorter poems are selected, this is the first translation to include his outstanding longer poetry. Harmony Garden will completely revise current attitudes in the west concerning classical Chines literature during the eighteenth century, a period that was long viewed as one of decline, but now appears to equal the golden ages of antiquity.

From the long-stemmed pipe to snuff, the water pipe, hand-rolled cigarettes, and finally, manufactured cigarettes, the history of tobacco in China is the fascinating story of a commodity that became a hallmark of modern mass consumerism. Carol Benedict follows the spread of Chinese tobacco use from the sixteenth century, when it was introduced to China from the New World, through the development of commercialized tobacco cultivation, and to the present day. Along the way, she analyzes the factors that have shaped China’s highly gendered tobacco cultures, and shows how they have evolved within a broad, comparative world-historical framework. Drawing from a wealth of historical sources—gazetteers, literati jottings (biji), Chinese materia medica, Qing poetry, modern short stories, late Qing and early Republican newspapers, travel memoirs, social surveys, advertisements, and more—Golden-Silk Smoke not only uncovers the long and dynamic history of tobacco in China but also sheds new light on global histories of fashion and consumption.

This article reassesses Ezra Pound’s Cathay as translation from Chinese Tang poetry rather than autonomous modernist verse. Building on Pound’s own poetics and compact coordinates from Chinese lyric theory, we argue that Cathay maintains translational fidelity by preserving and sharpening images while accepting losses in prosodic form and thinning some culture-specific encyclopaedias. Methodologically, we conduct a qualitative, contrastive microanalysis of two Li Bai poems “送友人” (Taking Leave of a Friend) and “长干行” (The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter), aligning the Chinese text, a neutral interlinear gloss, and Pound’s English version. A coding scheme tracks image handling, cultural markers, prosody, and the balance of phanopoeia, melopoeia, and logopoeia alongside domestication/foreignization choices. Findings show a stable hierarchy—image (phanopoeia)–stance (logopoeia)–sound/form (melopoeia)—that aligns with Chinese esthetic dynamics of yi/xiang (idea/form) and qing/jing (emotion/scene). Pound’s practice preserves correlative imagery (mountains/river/sunset; moss/leaves/butterflies) and voice, while paratextual titling, address terms, folklore allusions, toponyms, and a fifth-month calendar line reveal domestications, distortions, or omissions traceable to mediation via Fenollosa’s notes. We propose mechanism-sensitive criteria for evaluating distant-pair lyric translation: not formal replication, but reconstruction of the poem’s image–scene–emotion economy. On that basis, Cathay functions as translation—at justified costs. Rather than resolving the long-standing debate on Cathay, we offer a mechanism-sensitive account of how, in two central Li Bai poems, Pound’s image-centred poetics yields a limited but defensible form of translational fidelity within a relay-translation setting.

This study of poetry by women in late imperial China examines the metamorphosis of the trope of the \"inner chambers\" (gui), to which women were confined in traditional Chinese households, and which in literature were both a real and an imaginary place. Originally popularized in sixth-century \"palace style\" poetry, the inner chambers were used by male writers as a setting in which to celebrate female beauty, to lament the loneliness of abandoned women, and by extension, to serve as a political allegory for the exile of loyal and upright male ministers spurned by the imperial court. Female writers of lyric poetry (ci) soon adopted the theme, beginning its transition from male fantasy to multidimensional representation of women and their place in society, and eventually its manifestation in other poetic genres as well. Emerging from the role of sexual objects within poetry, late imperial women were agents of literary change in their expansion and complication of the boudoir theme. While some take ownership and de-eroticizing its imagery for their own purposes, adding voices of children and older women, and filling the inner chambers with purposeful activity such as conversation, teaching, religious ritual, music, sewing, childcare, and chess-playing, some simply want to escape from their confinement and protest gender restrictions imposed on women.Women's Poetry of Late Imperial Chinatraces this evolution across centuries, providing and analyzing examples of poetic themes, motifs, and imagery associated with the inner chambers, and demonstrating the complication and nuancing of the gui theme by increasingly aware and sophisticated women writers.

This paper provides an in-depth study of Morokoshi meishō zue, the only substantial Japanese illustrated book on the cultural geography of contemporaneous Qing China (1644 – 1911) produced during the Edo period (1603 – 1868). By analysing its appropriations of valuable and recent Chinese publications, insertion of Osaka-Kyoto identities, and production networks, this paper situates the book in the late Tokugawa context of social control and deviance. Examining the cultural connections surrounding the book’s production and consumption, this paper also proposes a revaluation of the art-historical cliché of the Japanese literati and reveals the social and political significances of their promotion of Chinese art and culture in early modern Japan.

During the Chenghua and Hongzhi reigns of the Ming, literati in the Wu region collected and admired Su Shi's calligraphic transcription of the Qingxu Tang Poem, and thereby inaugurated a wave of collective buyun compositions on this poem. In the Kangxi period, Wang Shizhen composed three cycles to the Qingxu Tang rhyme, while the scholars selected through the boxue hongru ( scholars selected through the special \"Broad Learning and Erudition\" examination) examination collectively responded to Ye Fang'ai's \"Inscribed on the Wall of the Hanlin Academy, Using Dongpo's Qingxu Tang Rhyme,\" further raising the poem's profile. The poem's subject matter - odes to snow and banquet gatherings - was among the most common in poetic tradition and thus readily invited sametopic responses. In addition, Su Shi's technique of \"one rhyme throughout\" and his essayistic style of \"writing poetry as prose\" made the piece a favored prompt for displays of talent at convivial gatherings. Qing writers' renewed responses to the buyun po

This case study is a collection of poems that reflect the geographical distribution of Chinese poets in the Ming dynasty. This collection is titled Ming Shizong 明詩綜, written by Zhu Yizun 朱彝尊 of the Qing dynasty (1636–1911). Quantitative analysis and geographical visualization of digital humanities are applied in this study. The distribution of poets in the Ming dynasty is characterized by the southernization and localization of maps of provinces and cities (or counties). These phenomena have specific reasons that involve politics, economy, education, culture, and elite families.