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Author: Shih-shan Henry Tsai
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791426876
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
This book is the first on Chinese eunuchs in English and presents a comprehensive picture of the role that they played in the Ming dynasty, 1368-1644. Extracted from a wide range of primary and secondary source material, the author provides significant and interesting information about court politics, espionage and internal security, military and foreign affairs, tax and tribute collection, the operation of imperial monopolies, judiciary review, the layout of the palace complex, the Grand Canal, and much more. The eunuchs are shown to be not just a minor adjunct to a government of civil servants and military officers, but a fully developed third branch of the Ming administration that participated in all of the most essential matters of the dynasty. The veil of condemnation and jealousy imposed on eunuchs by the compilers of official history is pulled away to reveal a richly textured tapestry. Eunuchs are portrayed in a balanced manner that gives due consideration to able and faithful service along with the inept, the lurid, and the iniquitous.
Author: Shih-shan Henry Tsai
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791426876
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306
Get Book
Book Description
This book is the first on Chinese eunuchs in English and presents a comprehensive picture of the role that they played in the Ming dynasty, 1368-1644. Extracted from a wide range of primary and secondary source material, the author provides significant and interesting information about court politics, espionage and internal security, military and foreign affairs, tax and tribute collection, the operation of imperial monopolies, judiciary review, the layout of the palace complex, the Grand Canal, and much more. The eunuchs are shown to be not just a minor adjunct to a government of civil servants and military officers, but a fully developed third branch of the Ming administration that participated in all of the most essential matters of the dynasty. The veil of condemnation and jealousy imposed on eunuchs by the compilers of official history is pulled away to reveal a richly textured tapestry. Eunuchs are portrayed in a balanced manner that gives due consideration to able and faithful service along with the inept, the lurid, and the iniquitous.
Author: Melissa S. Dale
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888455753
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
The history of Qing palace eunuchs is defined by a tension between the role eunuchs were meant to play and the life they intended to live. This study tells the story of how a complicated and much-maligned group of people struggled to insert a degree of agency into their lives. Rulers of the Qing dynasty were determined to ensure the eunuchs’ subservience and to limit their influence by imposing a management style based upon strict rules, corporal punishment, and collective responsibility. Few eunuchs wielded significant political power or lived in a lavish style during the Qing dynasty. Emasculation and employment in the palace placed eunuchs at the center of the empire, yet also subjected them to servile status and marginalization by society. Seeking more control over their lives, eunuchs serving the Qing repeatedly tested the boundaries of subservience to the emperor and the imperial court. This portrait of eunuch society reveals that Qing palace eunuchs operated within two parallel realms, one revolving around the emperor and the court by day and another among the eunuchs themselves by night where they recreated the social bonds—through drinking, gambling, and opium smoking—denied them by their palace service. Far from being the ideal servants, eunuchs proved to be a constant source of anxiety and labor challenges for the Qing court. For a long time eunuchs have simply been cast as villains in Chinese history. Inside the World of the Eunuch goes beyond this misleadingly one-dimensional depiction to show how eunuchs actually lived during the Qing dynasty. “This book is a thorough and responsible account of eunuch life during the Qing dynasty, which takes us deep inside the Forbidden City and introduces the often underclass families who provided servants to the Qing monarchs.” —R. Kent Guy, University of Washington “This is a unique study of Chinese eunuchs, in which Melissa Dale proves that they were a necessary and vital presence in the palace of the last dynasty in China. She explores all aspects of their life to the end of their existence, while avoiding the temptation to sensationalize them.” —Keith McMahon, University of Kansas
Author: Norman A. Kutcher
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520969847
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
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 important emperors, men who were deeply affected by the great eunuch corruption of the fallen Ming dynasty. In this groundbreaking and deeply researched book, the author explores how Qing emperors sought to prevent a return of the harmful excesses of eunuchs and how eunuchs flourished in the face of the restrictions imposed upon them. We meet powerful eunuchs who faithfully served, and in some cases ultimately betrayed, their emperors. We also meet ordinary eunuchs whose lives, punctuated by dramas large and small, provide a fascinating perspective on the Qing palace world.
Author: Taisuke Mitamura
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 184
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Book Description
This book traces the history of eunuchism from its very early days until November 5, 1924, when the system was finally banned and hundreds of eunuchs, "crying pitifully in high-pitched, feminine voices," were expelled from Tzu Chin Palace, thus ending a system that had endured over 2, 000 years and through 25 dynasties.
Author: Mary M. Anderson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
A little-known yet significant role in Chinese history was played by the palace eunuchs--castrated men who developed a concealed subcaste that manipulated monarchs and caused the downfall of immense dynasties. This book vividly chronicles the history of the imperial eunuchs: from the murky origins of the practice to the Ming dynasty when 100,000 eunuchs were employed as agents of the Dragon Throne, to the 1912 uprising that swept away the monarchy and the age-old eunuch system forever.
Author: David M. Robinson
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082486154X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
On a spring afternoon in 1509 a local bandit found himself in the emperor's private quarters deep within the Forbidden City and in the presence of the Son of Heaven himself. This bizarre meeting was the doing of the eunuch Zhang Zhong, the emperor's personal servant and companion. In time court intrigue between competing palace eunuchs would lead to the death of this bandit-turned-rebel, setting off a massive uprising that resulted in China's largest rebellion of the sixteenth century. To understand how this extraordinary meeting came about requires a consideration of the economy of violence during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). Here, for the first time in any language, is a detailed look at the role of illicit violence during the Ming. Drawing on court annals, imperial law codes, administrative regulations, private writings, and local gazetteers, David Robinson recreates in vivid detail a world where heavily armed highwaymen and bandits raided the boulevards in and around the Ming capital, Beijing. He then convincingly traces the roots of this systemic mayhem to economic, ethnic, social, and institutional factors at work in local society.
Author: Charles Hucker
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472901532
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 119
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Book Description
In the latter half of the fourteenth century, at one end of the Eurasian continent, the stage was not yet set for the emergence of modern nation-states. At the other end, the Chinese drove out their Mongol overlords, inaugurated a new native dynasty called Ming (1368–1644), and reasserted the mastery of their national destiny. It was a dramatic era of change, the full significance of which can only be perceived retrospectively. With the establishment of the Ming dynasty, a major historical tension rose into prominence between more absolutist and less absolutist modes of rulership. This produced a distinctive style of rule that modern students have come to call Ming despotism. It proved a capriciously absolutist pattern for Chinese government into our own time. [1, 2 ,3]
Author: John W. Dardess
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442204907
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 173
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Book Description
This engaging, deeply informed book provides the first concise history of one of China's most important eras. Leading scholar John W. Dardess offers a thematically organized political, social, and economic exploration of China from 1368 to 1644. He examines how the Ming dynasty was able to endure for 276 years, illuminating Ming foreign relations and border control, the lives and careers of its sixteen emperors, its system of governance and the kinds of people who served it, its great class of literati, and finally the mass outlawry that, in unhappy conjunction with the Manchu invasions from outside, ended the once-mighty dynasty in the mid-seventeenth century. The Ming witnessed the beginning of China's contact with the West, and its story will fascinate all readers interested in global as well as Asian history.
Author: Shih-shan Henry Tsai
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295800224
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295
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Book Description
The reign of Emperor Yongle, or “Perpetual Happiness,” was one of the most dramatic and significant in Chinese history. It began with civil war and a bloody coup, saw the construction of the Forbidden City, the completion of the Grand Canal, consolidation of the imperial bureaucracy, and expansion of China’s territory into Mongolia, Manchuria, and Vietnam. Beginning with an hour-by-hour account of one day in Yongle’s court, Shih-shan Henry Tsai presents the multiple dimensions of the life of Yongle (Zhu Di, 1360-1424) in fascinating detail. Tsai examines the role of birth, education, and tradition in molding the emperor’s personality and values, and paints a rich portrait of a man characterized by stark contrasts. Synthesizing primary and secondary source materials, he has crafted a colorful biography of the most renowned of the Ming emperors.
Author:
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
ISBN: 9780804806534
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
