front cover of Crisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-Century China
Crisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-Century China
Society, Culture, and Modernity in Li Yu's World
Chun-shu Chang and Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang
University of Michigan Press, 1998
The seventeenth century was a time of great social and political upheaval in China. In Crisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-Century China, Chun-shu Chang and Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang offer a detailed and engaging analysis of society, culture, and the state in China during this critical period.
The main thread of the book follows the life and works of a remarkable figure of the period, Li Yü (1611-80), whose vast array of accomplishments and experiences mirror seventeenth-century China in all its complexity and excitement. Li Yü's China was a world of unprecedented changes in almost all spheres of life. A thriving commercial and industrial economy, stupendous population growth, and the emergence of a new age of science and technology were accompanied by intense urbanization, radical views on money, wealth, and luxury, liberal attitudes toward sexuality, and developments that would change the nature of the literary and intellectual world. The Changs' exhaustive exploration of Chinese historical and literary sources of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is combined with a selective application of interpretive insights and analytic techniques from the major theoretical schools.
An important resource for scholars in history, literature, and Asian studies, Crisis and Transformation extends its appeal to those interested in the history of science, issues of gender and social transformation, and popular culture movements.
Chun-shu Chang is Professor of History, University of Michigan, and Honorary Professor of Chinese History, China. Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang is Visiting Associate Professor of History and Research Associate, Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan.
[more]

logo for Duke University Press
Fruitful Sites
Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China
Craig Clunas
Duke University Press, 1996
Gardens are sites that can be at one and the same time admired works of art and valuable pieces of real estate. As the first account in English to be wholly based on contemporary Chinese sources, this innovative, beautifully illustrated book grounds the practices of garden-making in Ming dynasty China (1368–1644) firmly in the social and cultural history of the day.
Who owned Ming gardens? Who visited them? How were they represented in words, in paintings, and in visual culture generally, and what meanings did these representations hold at different levels of Chinese society? How did the discourse of gardens intersect with other discourses such as those of aesthetics, agronomy, geomancy, and botany? By examining the gardens of the city of Suzhou from a number of different angles, Craig Clunas provides a rich picture of a complex cultural phenomenon—one that was of crucial importance to the self-fashioning of the Ming elite.
Drawing on a wide range of recent work in cultural theory, the author provides for the first time a historical and materialist account of Chinese garden culture, and replaces broad generalizations and orientalist fantasy with a convincing picture of the garden’s role in social life. Fruitful Sites will appeal to all students of China’s cultural history, to students of garden history from any part of the world, to art historians, and to readers engaged in Asian and cultural studies.
[more]

front cover of A Glossary of Words and Phrases in the Oral Performing and Dramatic Literatures of the Jin, Yuan, and Ming
A Glossary of Words and Phrases in the Oral Performing and Dramatic Literatures of the Jin, Yuan, and Ming
Dale R. Johnson
University of Michigan Press, 2002
For many years, the oral performing and dramatic literatures of China from 1200 to 1600 CE were considered some of the most difficult texts in the Chinese corpus. They included ballad medleys, comic farces, Yuan music dramas, Ming music dramas, and the novel Shuihu zhuan. The Japanese scholars who first dedicated themselves to study these works in the mid-twentieth century were considered daring. As late as 1981, no comprehensive dictionary or glossary for this literature existed in any language, Asian or Western.
A Glossary of Words and Phrases fills this gap for Western readers, allowing even a relative novice who has resonable command of Chinese to read, translate, and appreciate this great body of literature with an ease undreamed of even two decades ago. The Glossary is organized into approximately 8,000 entries based on the reading notes and glosses found in various dictionaries, thesauruses, glossaries, and editions of works from the period. Main entries are listed alphabetically in the pinyin romanization system. In addition to glosses, entries include symbolic annotations, guides to pronunciation, and text citations. The result is a broadly useful glossary serving the needs of students of this literature as well as scholars researching Jin and Yuan language and its usage.
[more]

front cover of Imperial China, 900–1800
Imperial China, 900–1800
F. W. Mote
Harvard University Press, 2000

This is a history of China for the 900-year time span of the late imperial period. A senior scholar of this epoch, F. W. Mote highlights the personal characteristics of the rulers and dynasties and probes the cultural theme of Chinese adaptations to recurrent alien rule. No other work provides a similar synthesis: generational events, personalities, and the spirit of the age combine to yield a comprehensive history of the civilization, not isolated but shaped by its relation to outsiders.

This vast panorama of the civilization of the largest society in human history reveals much about Chinese high and low culture, and the influential role of Confucian philosophical and social ideals. Throughout the Liao Empire, the world of the Song, the Mongol rule, and the early Qing through the Kangxi and Qianlong reigns, culture, ideas, and personalities are richly woven into the fabric of the political order and institutions. This is a monumental work that will stand among the classic accounts of the nature and vibrancy of Chinese civilization before the modern period.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
In the Wake of the Mongols
The Making of a New Social Order in North China, 1200–1600
Jinping Wang
Harvard University Press, 2018

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 northern Chinese men and women adapted to these trying circumstances and interacted with their alien Mongol conquerors to create a drastically new social order. To construct this story, the book uses a previously unknown source of inscriptions recorded on stone tablets.

Jinping Wang explores a north China where Mongol patrons, Daoist priests, Buddhist monks, and sometimes single women—rather than Confucian gentry—exercised power and shaped events, a portrait that upends the conventional view of imperial Chinese society. Setting the stage by portraying the late Jin and closing by tracing the Mongol period’s legacy during the Ming dynasty, she delineates the changing social dynamics over four centuries in the northern province of Shanxi, still a poorly understood region.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Information, Territory, and Networks
The Crisis and Maintenance of Empire in Song China
Hilde De Weerdt
Harvard University Press

The occupation of the northern half of the Chinese territories in the 1120s brought about a transformation in political communication in the south that had lasting implications for imperial Chinese history. By the late eleventh century, the Song court no longer dominated the production of information about itself and its territories. Song literati gradually consolidated their position as producers, users, and discussants of court gazettes, official records, archival compilations, dynastic histories, military geographies, and maps. This development altered the relationship between court and literati in political communication for the remainder of the imperial period. Based on a close reading of reader responses to official records and derivatives and on a mapping of literati networks, the author further proposes that the twelfth-century geopolitical crisis resulted in a lasting literati preference for imperial restoration and unified rule.

Hilde De Weerdt makes an important intervention in cultural and intellectual history by examining censorship and publicity together. In addition, she reorients the debate about the social transformation and local turn of imperial Chinese elites by treating the formation of localist strategies and empire-focused political identities as parallel rather than opposite trends.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Inked
Tattooed Soldiers and the Song Empire’s Penal-Military Complex
Elad Alyagon
Harvard University Press, 2023

Inked is a social history of common soldiers of the Song Dynasty, most of whom would have been recognized by their tattooed bodies. Overlooked in the historical record, tattoos were an indelible aspect of the Song world, and their ubiquity was tied to the rise of the penal–military complex, a vast system for social control, warfare, and labor.

Although much has been written about the institutional, strategic, and political aspects of the history of the Song and its military, this book is a first-of-its-kind investigation into the lives of the people who fought for the state. Elad Alyagon examines the army as a meeting place between marginalized social groups and elites. In the process, he shows the military to be a space where a new criminalized lower class was molded in a constant struggle between common soldiers and the agents of the Song state. For the millions of people caught in the orbit of this system—the tattooed soldiers, their families, and their neighbors—the Song period was no age of benevolence, but one of servitude, violence, and resistance. Inked is their story.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Just a Song
Chinese Lyrics from the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries
Stephen Owen
Harvard University Press, 2019

“Song Lyric,” ci, remains one of the most loved forms of Chinese poetry. From the early eleventh century through the first quarter of the twelfth century, song lyric evolved from an impromptu contribution in a performance practice to a full literary genre, in which the text might be read more often than performed. Young women singers, either indentured or private entrepreneurs, were at the heart of song practice throughout the period; the authors of the lyrics were notionally mostly male. A strange gender dynamic arose, in which men often wrote in the voice of a woman and her imagined feelings, then appropriated that sensibility for themselves.

As an essential part of becoming literature, a history was constructed for the new genre. At the same time the genre claimed a new set of aesthetic values to radically distinguish it from older “Classical Poetry,” shi. In a world that was either pragmatic or moralizing (or both), song lyric was a discourse of sensibility, which literally gave a beautiful voice to everything that seemed increasingly to be disappearing in the new Song dynasty world of righteousness and public advancement.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Li Mengyang, the North-South Divide, and Literati Learning in Ming China
Chang Woei Ong
Harvard University Press, 2016

Li Mengyang (1473–1530) was a scholar-official and man of letters who initiated the literary archaist movement that sought to restore ancient styles of prose and poetry in sixteenth-century China. In this first book-length study of Li in English, Chang Woei Ong comprehensively examines his intellectual scheme and situates Li’s quest to redefine literati learning as a way to build a perfect social order in the context of intellectual transitions since the Song dynasty.

Ong examines Li’s emergence at the distinctive historical juncture of the mid-Ming dynasty, when differences in literati cultures and visions were articulated as a north-south divide (both real and perceived) among Chinese thinkers. Ong argues that this divide, and the ways in which Ming literati compartmentalized learning, is key to understanding Li’s thought and its legacy. Though a northerner, Li became a powerful voice in prose and poetry, in both a positive and negative sense, as he was championed or castigated by the southern literati communities. The southern literati’s indifference toward Li’s other intellectual endeavors—including cosmology, ethics, political philosophy, and historiography—furthered his utter marginalization in those fields.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Localizing Learning
The Literati Enterprise in Wuzhou, 1100–1600
Peter K. Bol
Harvard University Press, 2022

As the first intellectual history of Song, Yuan, and Ming China written from a local perspective, Localizing Learning shows how literati learning in Wuzhou came to encompass examination studies, Neo-Confucian moral philosophy, historical and Classical scholarship, encyclopedic learnedness, and literary writing, and traces how debates over the relative value of moral cultivation, cultural accomplishment, and political service unfolded locally.

The book is set in one locality, Wuzhou (later Jinhua), a prefecture in China’s Zhejiang province, from the twelfth through the sixteenth century. Its main actors are literati of the Song, Yuan, and Ming, who created a local tradition of learning as a means of cementing their common identity and their claim to moral, political, and cultural leadership. Close readings of philosophical and literary texts with quantitative analysis of social and kinship networks consider why and how the local literati enterprise was built.

By treating learning as the subject, it broadens our perspective, going beyond a history of ideas to investigate the social practices and networks of kinship and collegiality with which literati defined themselves in local, regional, and national contexts.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Martial Spectacles of the Ming Court
David M. Robinson
Harvard University Press, 2013
Like most empires, the Ming court sponsored grand displays of dynastic strength and military prowess. Covering the first two centuries of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), Martial Spectacles of the Ming Court explores how the royal hunt, polo matches, archery contests, equestrian demonstrations, and the imperial menagerie were represented in poetry, prose, and portraiture. This study reveals that martial spectacles were highly charged sites of contestation, where Ming emperors and senior court ministers staked claims about rulership, ruler-minister relations, and the role of the military in the polity. Simultaneously colorful entertainment, prestigious social events, and statements of power, martial spectacles were intended to make manifest the ruler’s personal generosity, keen discernment, and respect for family tradition. They were, however, subject to competing interpretations that were often beyond the emperor’s control or even knowledge. By situating Ming martial spectacles in the wider context of Eurasia, David Robinson brings to light the commensurability of the Ming court with both the Mongols and Manchus but more broadly with other early modern courts such as the Timurids, the Mughals, and the Ottomans.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Men of Letters within the Passes
Guanzhong Literati in Chinese History, 907–1911
Chang Woei Ong
Harvard University Press, 2008
The main theme of this book is the interaction between two “places,” China and Guanzhong, the capital area of several dynasties. It addresses such questions as What do we mean by “local”? Did the inhabitants of a locality believe that being “local” required them to assume a certain identity? If so, how did they talk and write about it? Were there spatial and temporal differences in the representation of locales? This work examines how Guanzhong literati conceptualized three sets of relations: central/regional, “official”/“unofficial,” and national/local. It further traces the formation over the last millennium of the imperial state of a critical communal self-consciousness, the role of this consciousness in constructing a local identity and promoting an “unofficial” space for nonofficial elite activism, and the effect of the presence (or absence) of this consciousness on literati views of central-­regional relationships. The issue here is not whether there can be a shared national culture, but whether this culture can be perceived as having regional variations and therefore contributing to the formation of a local identity.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Military Establishment of the Yuan Dynasty
Ch'i-Ch'ing Hsiao
Harvard University Press, 1978

front cover of The Monkey and the Inkpot
The Monkey and the Inkpot
Natural History and Its Transformations in Early Modern China
Carla Nappi
Harvard University Press, 2009

This is the story of a Chinese doctor, his book, and the creatures that danced within its pages. The Monkey and the Inkpot introduces natural history in sixteenth-century China through the iconic Bencao gangmu (Systematic materia medica) of Li Shizhen (1518–1593).

The encyclopedic Bencao gangmu is widely lauded as a classic embodiment of pre-modern Chinese medical thought. In the first book-length study in English of Li’s text, Carla Nappi reveals a “cabinet of curiosities” of gems, beasts, and oddities whose author was devoted to using natural history to guide the application of natural and artificial objects as medical drugs. Nappi examines the making of facts and weighing of evidence in a massive collection where tales of wildmen and dragons were recorded alongside recipes for ginseng and peonies.

Nappi challenges the idea of a monolithic tradition of Chinese herbal medicine by showing the importance of debate and disagreement in early modern scholarly and medical culture. The Monkey and the Inkpot also illuminates the modern fate of a book that continues to shape alternative healing practices, global pharmaceutical markets, and Chinese culture.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Negotiated Power
The State, Elites, and Local Governance in Twelfth- to Fourteenth-Century China
Sukhee Lee
Harvard University Press, 2014
The internal dynamics driving the relationship between the state and local society during the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties has both captivated and baffled scholars. In this book, Sukhee Lee posits an alternative understanding of the relationship between the state and social elites in the middle period of Chinese imperial history. Directly challenging the assumption of a zero-sum competition between the power of the state and that of local elites, Negotiated Power shows in vivid detail how state power and local elite interests were mutually constitutive and reinforcing. It was precisely the connectedness of social elites to the state, as well as the presence of the state in local life, that was essential to the rise of a self-conscious local elite society during this period. In probing the historical trajectory of Mingzhou prefecture (today’s Ningbo), Lee makes extensive use of local gazetteers from the Southern Song and the Yuan dynasties, and the abundant literary collections that still survive from this area, including some 280 epitaphs written for Mingzhou people of the time.
[more]

front cover of Nominal Things
Nominal Things
Bronzes in the Making of Medieval China
Jeffrey Moser
University of Chicago Press, 2023
How the medieval study of ancient bronzes influenced the production of knowledge and the making of things in East Asia.
 
This book opens in eleventh-century China, where scholars were the first in world history to systematically illustrate and document ancient artifacts. As Jeffrey Moser argues, the visual, technical, and conceptual mechanisms they developed to record these objects laid the foundations for methods of visualizing knowledge that scholars throughout early modern East Asia would use to make sense of the world around them.
 
Of the artifacts these scholars studied, the most celebrated were bronze ritual vessels that had been cast nearly two thousand years earlier. While working to make sense of the relationship between the bronzes’ complex shapes and their inscribed glyphs, they came to realize that the objects were “nominal things”—objects inscribed with names that identified their own categories and uses. Eleventh-century scholars knew the meaning of these glyphs from hallowed Confucian writings that had been passed down through centuries, but they found shocking disconnects between the names and the bronzes on which they were inscribed. Nominal Things traces the process by which a distinctive system of empiricism was nurtured by discrepancies between the complex materiality of the bronzes and their inscriptions. By revealing the connections between the new empiricism and older ways of knowing, the book explains how scholars refashioned the words of the Confucian classics into material reality.
 
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
A Northern Alternative
Xue Xuan (1389–1464) and the Hedong School
Khee Heong Koh
Harvard University Press, 2011

Conventional portraits of Neo-Confucianism in China are built on studies of scholars active in the south, yet Xue Xuan (1389–1464), the first Ming Neo-Confucian to be enshrined in the Temple to Confucius, was a northerner. Why has Xue been so overlooked in the history of Neo-Confucianism? In this first systematic study in English of the highly influential thinker, author Khee Heong Koh seeks to redress Xue’s marginalization while showing how a study interested mainly in “ideas” can integrate social and intellectual history to offer a broader picture of history.

Significant in its attention to Xue as well as its approach, the book situates the ideas of Xue and his Hedong School in comparative perspective. Koh first provides in-depth analysis of Xue’s philosophy, as well as his ideas on kinship organizations, educational institutions, and intellectual networks, and then places them in the context of Xue’s life and the actual practices of his descendants and students. Through this new approach to intellectual history, Koh demonstrates the complexity of the Neo-Confucian tradition and gives voice to a group of northern scholars who identified themselves as Neo-Confucians but had a vision that was distinctly different from their southern counterparts.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Powerful Relations
Kinship, Status, and the State in Sung China (960–1279)
Beverly J. Bossler
Harvard University Press, 1998

The realignment of the Chinese social order that took place over the course of the Sung dynasty set the pattern for Chinese society throughout most of the later imperial era. This study examines that realignment from the perspective of specific Sung families, using data on two groups of Sung elites—the grand councilors who led the bureaucracy and locally prominent gentlemen in Wu-chou (in modern Chekiang).

By analyzing kinship relationships, Beverly Bossler demonstrates the importance of family relations to the establishment and perpetuation of social status locally and in the capital. She shows how social position was measured and acted upon, how status shaped personal relationships (and vice versa), and how both status and personal relationships conditioned—and were conditioned by—political success. Finally, in a contribution to the ongoing discussion of localism in the Sung, Bossler details the varied networks that connected the local elite to the capital and elsewhere.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Printing for Profit
The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian (11th–17th Centuries)
Lucille Chia
Harvard University Press, 2002

From the eleventh through the seventeenth centuries, the publishers of Jianyang in Fujian province played a conspicuous role in the Chinese book trade. Unlike the products of government and educational presses, their publications were destined for the retail book market. These publishers survived by responding to consumer demands for dictionaries, histories, geographies, medical texts, encyclopedias, primers, how-to books, novels, and anthologies. Their publications reflect the varied needs of the full range of readers in late imperial China and allow us to study the reading habits, tastes, and literacy of different social groups. The publishers of Jianyang were also businessmen, and their efforts to produce books efficiently, meet the demands of the market, and distribute their publications provide a window on commerce and industry and the growth of regional and national markets.

The broad cultural, historical, and geographical scope of the Jianyang book trade makes it an ideal subject for the study of publishing in China. Based on an extensive study of Jianyang imprints, genealogies of the leading families of printers, local histories, documents, and annotated catalogs and bibliographies, Lucille Chia has written not only a history of commercial printing but also a wide-ranging study of the culture of the book in traditional China.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Problem of Beauty
Aesthetic Thought and Pursuits in Northern Song Dynasty China
Ronald C. Egan
Harvard University Press, 2006

During the Northern Song dynasty (960-1126), new ground was broken in aesthetic thought, particularly in the fields of art collecting, poetry criticism, connoisseurship of flowers, and the song lyric. Collectively these activities constitute much of what was distinctive about Northern Song culture. Yet the subjects treated here were unprecedented when they appeared; consequently, bold exploration was coupled with anxiety about the worth of these interests, especially given the Confucian biases against these pursuits.

Despite differences in each area, certain overarching themes surface repeatedly. Together, these interests and choices suggest a logic behind the new directions of literati culture in the Northern Song. By focusing on the "problem of beauty," the author calls attention to the difficulties that Northern Song innovators faced in justifying these new pursuits.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Shen Gua’s Empiricism
Ya Zuo
Harvard University Press, 2018

Shen Gua (1031−1095) is a household name in China, known as a distinguished renaissance man and the author of Brush Talks from Dream Brook, an old text whose remarkable “scientific” discoveries make it appear curiously ahead of its time. In this first book-length study of Shen in English, Ya Zuo reveals the connection between Shen’s life as an active statesman and his ideas, specifically the empirical stance manifested through his wide-ranging inquiries. She places Shen on the broad horizon of premodern Chinese thought, and presents his empiricism within an extensive narrative of Chinese epistemology.

Relying on Shen as a searchlight, Zuo focuses in on how an individual thinker summoned conditions and concepts from the vast Chinese intellectual tradition to build a singular way of knowing. Moreover, her study of Shen provides insights into the complex dynamics in play at the dawn of the age of Neo-Confucianism and compels readers to achieve a deeper appreciation of the diversity in Chinese thinking.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Shrines to Living Men in the Ming Political Cosmos
Sarah Schneewind
Harvard University Press, 2018

Shrines to Living Men in the Ming Political Cosmos, the first book focusing on premortem shrines in any era of Chinese history, places the institution at the intersection of politics and religion. When a local official left his post, grateful subjects housed an image of him in a temple, requiting his grace: that was the ideal model. By Ming times, the “living shrine” was legal, old, and justified by readings of the classics.

Sarah Schneewind argues that the institution could invite and pressure officials to serve local interests; the policies that had earned a man commemoration were carved into stone beside the shrine. Since everyone recognized that elite men might honor living officials just to further their own careers, premortem shrine rhetoric stressed the role of commoners, who embraced the opportunity by initiating many living shrines. This legitimate, institutionalized political voice for commoners expands a scholarly understanding of “public opinion” in late imperial China, aligning it with the efficacy of deities to create a nascent political conception Schneewind calls the “minor Mandate of Heaven.” Her exploration of premortem shrine theory and practice illuminates Ming thought and politics, including the Donglin Party’s battle with eunuch dictator Wei Zhongxian and Gu Yanwu’s theories.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History
Paul Jakov Smith
Harvard University Press, 2003

This volume seeks to study the connections between two well-studied epochs in Chinese history: the mid-imperial era of the Tang and Song (ca. 800-1270) and the late imperial era of the late Ming and Qing (1550-1900). Both eras are seen as periods of explosive change, particularly in economic activity, characterized by the emergence of new forms of social organization and a dramatic expansion in knowledge and culture. The task of establishing links between these two periods has been impeded by a lack of knowledge of the intervening Mongol Yuan dynasty (1271-1368). This historiographical "black hole" has artificially interrupted the narrative of Chinese history and bifurcated it into two distinct epochs.

This volume aims to restore continuity to that historical narrative by filling the gap between mid-imperial and late imperial China. The contributors argue that the Song-Yuan-Ming transition (early twelfth through the late fifteenth century) constitutes a distinct historical period of transition and not one of interruption and devolution. They trace this transition by investigating such subjects as contemporary impressions of the period, the role of the Mongols in intellectual life, the economy of Jiangnan, urban growth, neo-Confucianism and local society, commercial publishing, comic drama, and medical learning.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Ten Thousand Scrolls
Reading and Writing in the Poetics of Huang Tingjian and the Late Northern Song
Yugen Wang
Harvard University Press, 2011

The Northern Song (960–1126) was one of the most transformative periods in Chinese literary history, characterized by the emergence of printing and an ensuing proliferation of books. The poet Huang Tingjian (1045–1105), writing at the height of this period, both defined and was defined by these changes. The first focused study on the cultural consequences of printing in Northern Song China, this book examines how the nascent print culture shaped the poetic theory and practice of Huang Tingjian and the Jiangxi School of Poetry he founded.

Author Yugen Wang argues that at the core of Huang and the Jiangxi School’s search for poetic methods was their desire to find a new way of reading and writing that could effectively address the changed literary landscape of the eleventh century. Wang chronicles the historical and cultural negotiation Huang and his colleagues were conducting as they responded to the new book culture, and opens new ground for investigating the literary interpretive and hermeneutical effects of printing. This book should be of interest not only to scholars and readers of classical Chinese poetry but to anyone concerned with how the material interacts with the intellectual and how technology has influenced our conception and practice of reading and writing throughout history.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Traces of Grand Peace
Classics and State Activism in Imperial China
Jaeyoon Song
Harvard University Press, 2015
Since the second century BC the Confucian Classics, endorsed by the successive ruling houses of imperial China, had stood in tension with the statist ideals of “big government.” In Northern Song China (960–1127), a group of reform-minded statesmen and thinkers sought to remove the tension between the two by revisiting the highly controversial classic, the Rituals of Zhou: the administrative blueprint of an archaic bureaucratic state with the six ministries of some 370 offices staffed by close to 94,000 men. With their revisionist approaches, they reinvented it as the constitution of state activism. Most importantly, the reform-councilor Wang Anshi’s (1021–1086) new commentary on the Rituals of Zhou rose to preeminence during the New Policies period (ca. 1068–1125), only to be swept into the dustbin of history afterward. By reconstructing his revisionist exegesis from its partial remains, this book illuminates the interplay between classics, thinkers, and government in statist reform, and explains why the uneasy marriage between classics and state activism had to fail in imperial China.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter