China

Eunuch and Emperor in the Great Age of Qing Rule offers a new interpretation of eunuchs and their connection to imperial rule in the first century and a half of the Qing dynasty (1644-1800). This period encompassed the reigns of three of China's most...

The rise of China and its status as a leading global factory are altering the way people live and consume. At the same time, the world appears wary of the real costs involved. Fantasy Islands probes Chinese, European, and American eco-desire and...

For many years it has been known that scholars of Chinese history and culture must keep abreast of scholarship in Japan, but the great majority have found that to be difficult. Japanese for Sinologists is the first textbook dedicated to helping...

Farewell to the God of Plague reassesses the celebrated Maoist health care model through the lens of Mao's famous campaign against snail fever. Using newly available archives, Miriam Gross documents how economic, political, and cultural realities led to...

What can we learn about modern Chinese history by reading a marginalized set of materials from a widely neglected period? In Republican Lens, Joan Judge retrieves and revalorizes the vital brand of commercial culture that arose in the period surrounding...

The Age of Irreverence tells the story of why China's entry into the modern age was not just traumatic, but uproarious. As the Qing dynasty slumped toward extinction, prominent writers compiled jokes into collections they called histories of laughter."...

The era between empire and communism is routinely portrayed as a catastrophic interlude in China's modern history. But in this book, Frank Dikotter shows that the first half of the twentieth century was characterized by unprecedented openness. He argues...

At midnight on June 30, 1997, Hong Kong became part of the People's Republic of China. The transfer of Hong Kong sovereignty from Great Britain to China was an extraordinary historical event, signifying the end of the West's colonial presence in Asia and...

Contrary to longtime assumptions about the insular nature of imperial China's legal system, Circulating the Code demonstrates that in the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) most legal books were commercially published and available to anyone who could afford to...

Following a remarkable transition from authoritarian rule to robust democracy, Taiwan has grown into a prosperous but widely unrecognized nation-state for which no uncontested sovereign space exists. Increasingly vigorous assertions of Taiwanese identity...

The city of Qufu, in north China's Shandong Province, is famous as the hometown of Kong Qiu (551-479 BCE)-known as Confucius in English and as Kongzi or Kong Fuzi in Chinese. In The Kongs of Qufu, Christopher Agnew chronicles the history of the sage's...

In early modern China, Jesuit missionaries associated with the male elite of Confucian literati in order to proselytize more freely, but they had limited contact with women, whose ritual spaces were less accessible. Historians of Catholic evangelism have...

Forming the Early Chinese Court builds on new directions in comparative studies of royal courts in the ancient world to present a pioneering study of early Chinese court culture. Rejecting divides between literary, political, and administrative texts,...

The figure of Dai Zhen (1724-1777) looms large in modern Chinese intellectual history. Dai was a mathematical astronomer and influential polymath who, along with like-minded scholars, sought to balance understandings of science, technology, and history...

Shanghai, a dynamic world metropolis, is home to a multitude of religions, from Buddhism and Islam, to Christianity and Baha'ism, to Hinduism and Daoism, and many more. In this city of 24 million inhabitants, new religious groups and older faiths...

Preparing and consuming food is an integral part of identity formation, which in contemporary China embodies tension between fast-forward modernization and cultural nostalgia. Jin Feng's wide-ranging exploration of cities in the Lower Yangzi Delta-or...

Preparing and consuming food is an integral part of identity formation, which in contemporary China embodies tension between fast-forward modernization and cultural nostalgia. Jin Feng's wide-ranging exploration of cities in the Lower Yangzi Delta-or...

The story of Mulian rescuing his mother's soul from hell has evolved as a narrative over several centuries in China, especially in the baojuan (precious scrolls) genre. This genre, a prosimetric narrative in vernacular language, first appeared around the...

This is the first book to focus explicitly on how China's rise as a major economic and political actor has affected societies in Southeast Asia. It examines how Chinese investors, workers, tourists, bureaucrats, longtime residents, and adventurers...

Many of the millions of workers streaming in from rural China to jobs at urban factories soon find themselves in new kinds of poverty and oppression. Yet, their individual experiences are far more nuanced than popular narratives might suggest. Rural...

Each successive wave of revolution to hit modern China-political, cultural, and economic-has radically reshaped Chinese society. Whereas patriarchy defined the familial social structure for thousands of years, changing realities in the last hundred years...

Across eighteenth-century China a wide range of common people forged government documents or pretended to be officials or other agents of the state. This examination of case records and law codes traces the legal meanings and social and political...

The figure of Dai Zhen (1724-1777) looms large in modern Chinese intellectual history. Dai was a mathematical astronomer and influential polymath who, along with like-minded scholars, sought to balance understandings of science, technology, and history...

This collection of short stories, anecdotes, and poems was likely compiled during the 13th century. Tales of romantic love-including courtship, marriage, and illicit affairs-unify the collection and make it an essential primary source for literary and...

In The Limits of the Rule of Law in China, fourteen authors from different academic disciplines reflect on questions that have troubled Chinese and Western scholars of jurisprudence since classical times. Using data from the early 19th century through...

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295804811 This historical investigation describes the Qing imperial authorities' attempts to consolidate control over the Zhongjia, a non-Han population, in eighteenth-century Guizhou, a poor, remote, and...

"From the cry of a tiny insect, one can hear the sound of a vast world. . . ." So begins Zhang Daye's preface to The World of a Tiny Insect, his haunting memoir of war and its aftermath. In 1861, when China's devastating Taiping rebellion...

Sima Qian (first century BCE), the author of Record of the Historian (Shiji), is China's earliest and best-known historian, and his "Letter to Ren An" is the most famous letter in Chinese history. In the letter, Sima Qian explains his decision to finish...

During the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), the province emerged as an important element in the management of the expanding Chinese empire, with governors -- those in charge of these increasingly influential administrative units -- playing key roles. R. Kent...

Puer tea has been grown for centuries in the "Six Great Tea Mountains" of Yunnan Province, and in imperial China it was a prized commodity, traded to Tibet by horse or mule caravan via the so-called Tea Horse Road and presented as tribute to...

The emergence and spread of literacy in ancient human society an important topic for all who study the ancient world, and the development of written Chinese is of particular interest, as modern Chinese orthography preserves logographic principles shared...

The scientists and explorers profiled in this engaging study of pioneering Euro-American exploration of late imperial and Republican China range from botanists to ethnographers to missionaries. Although a diverse lot, all believed in objective,...

During China's last dynasty, the Qing (1644-1911), the empire's remote, bleak, and politically insignificant Southwest rose to become a strategically vital area. This study of the imperial government's handling of the southwestern frontier illuminates...

On May 4, 1919, thousands of students protested the Versailles treaty in Beijing. Seventy years later, another generation demonstrated in Tiananmen Square. Climbing the Monument of the People's Heroes, these protestors stood against a relief of their...

The origin of political modernity has long been tied to the Western history of protest and revolution, the currents of which many believe sparked popular dissent worldwide. Reviewing nearly one thousand instances of protest in China from the eighteenth...

Featuring experts from Europe, Australia, Japan, China, and the United States, this collection of essays follows changes in the theory and policy of China's death penalty from the Mao era (1949-1979) through the Deng era (1980-1997) up to the present day...

The end of communist rule in China will be one of the most momentous events of the twenty-first century, sounding the death knell for the Marxist-Leninist experiment and changing the lives of a fifth of humanity. This book provides a likely blow-by-blow...

With its fresh translations by newer voices in the field, its broad scope, and its flowing style, this anthology places the immense riches of Chinese literature within easy reach. Ranging from the beginnings to 1919, this abridged version of The Columbia...

China's constitution explicitly refers to its sovereign domain as "sacred territory." Why does an avowedly secular state make such a claim, and what does this suggest about the relations between religion and the nation-state? Focusing primarily...

In the early years of the twenty-first century, China and India have emerged as world powers. In many respects, this is a return to the historical norm for both countries. For much of the early modern period, China and India were global leaders in a...