China

In the early twentieth century, a time of political fragmentation and social upheaval in China, poverty became the focus of an anguished national conversation about the future of the country. Investigating the lives of the urban poor in China during this...

Body, Society, and Nation tells the story of China's unfolding modernity by exploring the changing ideas, practices, and systems related to health and body in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Shanghai. The pursuit of good health loomed large in...

Tracing journeys of Cantonese migrants along the West River and its tributaries, this book describes the circulation of people through one of the world's great river systems between the late sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Steven B. Miles...

This second edition of Dru Gladney's critically acclaimed study of the Muslim population in China includes a new preface by the author, as well as a valuable addendum to the bibliography, already hailed as one of the most extensive listing of modern...

Hong Kong is perched on the fault line between China and the West, a Special Administrative Region of the PRC. Leo Ou-fan Lee offers an insider's view of Hong Kong, capturing the history and culture that make his densely packed home city so different...

Sibao today is a cluster of impoverished villages in the mountains of western Fujian. Yet from the late seventeenth through the early twentieth century, it was home to a flourishing publishing industry. Through itinerant booksellers and branch bookshops...

This book examines the Third Chinese Revolutionary Civil War of 1945-1949, which resulted in the victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over Chiang Kaishek and the Guomindang (GMD) and the founding of The People's Republic of China in 1949. It...

Though there are a number of well-written works on Chinese divination, there are none that deal with the three sophisticated devices that were employed by the Chinese Astronomical Bureau in the eleventh century and for hundreds of years thereafter...

Originating in the 1820s and used for 150 years thereafter, qiaopi is the name given in Chinese to letters written home by Chinese emigrants to accompany remittances. Their key function was to preserve family ties. Although such correspondence focused...

Despite the popularity of sport in contemporary China, the practice of physical education is not indigenous to its culture. Strenuous physical activity was traditionally linked to low class and status in the pre-modern Chinese society. The concept of...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.AwardsShort-listed for The Baillie Gifford Prize 2018.Book InformationISBN 9780345803023Author Stephen R. PlattFormat PaperbackPage Count 592Imprint Vintage BooksPublisher Random...

The Edge of Knowing explores the relationship between the rhetoric of dreams and realist literary practice in modern Chinese literature from the May Fourth Era in the early twentieth century through the period just following the end of the Cultural...

During the Ming-Qing transition (roughly from the 1570s to the 1680s), literati-officials in China employed public forms of writing, art, and social spectacle to present positive moral images of themselves and negative images of their rivals. The rise of...

A Choice Outstanding Academic TitleThe White Lotus War (1796-1804) in central China marked the end of the Qing dynasty's golden age and the fatal weakening of the imperial system itself. What started as a local rebellion grew into a serious political...

Symptoms of an Unruly Age compares the writings of Li Zhi (1527-1602) and his late-Ming compatriots to texts composed by their European contemporaries, including Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Cervantes. Emphasizing aesthetic patterns that transcend...

Early in the seventeenth century, Northeast Asian politics hung in a delicate balance among the Choson dynasty in Korea, the Ming in China, and the Manchu. When a Choson faction realigned Korea with the Ming, the Manchu attacked in 1627 and again a...

During the years spanning the late Qing dynasty and the early Republican era, the status of Chinese women changed in both subtle and decisive ways. As domestic seclusion ceased to be a sign of virtue, new opportunities emerged for a variety of women...

The quest for gentility has shaped Chinese civilization and the formation of culture in China until the present day. This book analyzes social aspirations and cultural practices in China from 1550 to 1999, showing how the notion of gentility has evolved...

Under the Song Dynasty, China experienced rapid commercial growth and monetization of the economy. In the same period, the austere ethical turn that led to neo-Confucianism was becoming increasingly prevalent in the imperial bureaucracy and literati...

In this volume, Hui Zou analyzes historical, architectural, visual, literary, and philosophical perspectives on the Western-styled garden that formed part of the great Yuanming Yuan complex in Beijing, constructed during the Qing dynasty. Designed and...

This accessible history of Confucianism, or the 'Way of the Ru', emphasizes the religious dimensions of the tradition. It clearly explains the tradition's unique and subtle philosophical ideals as well as the 'arts of the Ru' whereby seemingly simple...

Laura Hostetler here shows how Qing China (1636-1911) used cartography and ethnography to pursue its imperial ambitions. She argues that far from being on the periphery of developments in the early modern period, Qing China both participated in and...

The Kam are still essentially a 'hidden people' - very little has been published in English about them. This book aims to fill a gap in the English literature, by providing a comprehensive introduction to Kam culture. The conclusion looks to the future...

Delving into three hundred years of Chinese literature, from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, "The Libertine's Friend" uncovers the complex and fascinating history of male homosexual and homosocial relations in the late imperial era...

From precious jade articles to monumental stone arches, Huizhou salt merchants in Jiangnan lived surrounded by objects in eighteenth-century China. How and why did these businessmen devote themselves to these items? What can we learn about...

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...

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the region of Liangshan in southwest China was plagued by violence. Indigenous Nuosu communities clashed with Han migrants, the Qing and Republican states, and local warlords. Large numbers of Nuosu and...

This book examines the widespread practice of self-publishing by writers in late imperial China, focusing on the relationships between manuscript tradition and print convention, peer patronage and popular fame, and gift exchange and commercial...

Ancestors, Kings, and the Dao outlines the evolution of musical performance in early China, first within and then ultimately away from the socio-religious context of ancestor worship. Examining newly discovered bamboo texts from the Warring States...

"Chinese people should consume Chinese products!" This slogan was the catchphrase of a movement in early twentieth-century China that sought to link consumption and nationalism by instilling a concept of China as a modern "nation" with its own "national...

The Mongol conquest of north China between 1211 and 1234 inflicted terrible wartime destruction, wiping out more than one-third of the population and dismantling the existing social order. In the Wake of the Mongols recounts the riveting story of how...

This is a groundbreaking analysis of China's territorial disputes, exploring the successes and failures of negotiations that have taken place between its three neighbours, namely India, Japan and Russia. By using Roberts Putnam's two level game...

This book examines the emerging maritime security scene in Southeast Asia. It considers highly topical implications for the region of possible strategic competition between China and India - the rising naval powers of Asia - with a possible naval...

Written by a team of leading China scholars, this book explores the dynamics of state power and legitimation in twenty-first century China, and the implications of changing state-society relations for the future viability of the People's Republic. Key...

During the period 1949 to 1979, communist China was officially pursuing a policy of self-sufficiency, and the United States and its allies were officially implementing a trade embargo against communist China. However, this book, based on extensive...

The relationship between Taiwan and the People's Republic of China is regarded as a very serious potential source of conflict in East Asia, especially now that the questions of Hong Kong and Macau have been settled, and increased democratisation in...

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...

Smuggling along the Chinese coast has been a thorn in the side of many regimes. From opium and weapons concealed aboard foreign steamships in the Qing dynasty to nylon stockings and wristwatches trafficked in the People's Republic, contests between state...

How did American schoolchildren, French philosophers, Russian Sinologists, Dutch merchants, and British lawyers imagine China and Chinese law? What happened when agents of presumably dominant Western empires had to endure the humiliations and anxieties...

At the entrance of The Field Museum's Cyrus Tang Hall of China, two Chinese stone guardian lions stand tall, gazing down intently at approaching visitors. One lion's paw rests upon a decorated ball symbolizing power, while the other lion cradles a cub...