China during the Tang-Song Interregnum, 878–978

China during the Tang-Song Interregnum, 878–978 PDF Author: Hugh Clark
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000426394
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 121

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Book Description
This book challenges the long-established structure of Chinese history around dynasties, adopting a more "organic" approach which emphasises cultural and economic trends that transcend arbitrary dynastic boundaries. It argues that with the collapse of the Tang court and northern control over the holistic empire in the last decades of the ninth century, the now-autonomous kingdoms that filled the political vacuum in the south responded with a burst of innovative energy that helped set the stage for the economic and cultural transformations of the following Song dynasty. Moreover, it argues that these transformations and this economic and cultural innovation deeply affected the subsequent model of holistic empire which continues right up to the present and that therefore the interregnum century of division left a critically important legacy.

China during the Tang-Song Interregnum, 878–978

China during the Tang-Song Interregnum, 878–978 PDF Author: Hugh Clark
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000426394
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 121

Get Book

Book Description
This book challenges the long-established structure of Chinese history around dynasties, adopting a more "organic" approach which emphasises cultural and economic trends that transcend arbitrary dynastic boundaries. It argues that with the collapse of the Tang court and northern control over the holistic empire in the last decades of the ninth century, the now-autonomous kingdoms that filled the political vacuum in the south responded with a burst of innovative energy that helped set the stage for the economic and cultural transformations of the following Song dynasty. Moreover, it argues that these transformations and this economic and cultural innovation deeply affected the subsequent model of holistic empire which continues right up to the present and that therefore the interregnum century of division left a critically important legacy.

Globalism in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age

Globalism in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111190226
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 652

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Book Description
Although it is fashionable among modernists to claim that globalism emerged only since ca. 1800, the opposite can well be documented through careful comparative and transdisciplinary studies, as this volume demonstrates, offering a wide range of innovative perspectives on often neglected literary, philosophical, historical, or medical documents. Texts, images, ideas, knowledge, and objects migrated throughout the world already in the pre-modern world, even if the quantitative level compared to the modern world might have been different. In fact, by means of translations and trade, for instance, global connections were established and maintained over the centuries. Archetypal motifs developed in many literatures indicate how much pre-modern people actually shared. But we also discover hard-core facts of global economic exchange, import of exotic medicine, and, on another level, intensive intellectual debates on religious issues. Literary evidence serves best to expose the extent to which contacts with people in foreign countries were imaginable, often desirable, and at times feared, of course. The pre-modern world was much more on the move and reached out to distant lands out of curiosity, economic interests, and political and military concerns. Diplomats crisscrossed the continents, and artists, poets, and craftsmen traveled widely. We can identify, for instance, both the Vikings and the Arabs as global players long before the rise of modern globalism, so this volume promises to rewrite many of our traditional notions about pre-modern worldviews, economic conditions, and the literary sharing on a global level, as perhaps best expressed by the genre of the fable.

China's New Imperialism

China's New Imperialism PDF Author: Yu-Ping Chang
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000828689
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
This book discusses the nature of China’s current international reassertion of itself and the thinking and attitudes which lie behind it. It argues that the Chinese leadership has a strongly held view of its own high moral authority, which emphasizes inclusion, equality and mutual benefits, and that this sense of morality underpins the driving forces for China’s foreign policies, rationalization of China’s overseas activities, the overall Chinese worldview, and China’s vision of a Chinese world order. It highlights how the country’s outward expansion has been characterized mainly by spreading influence through non-use of force and strategies of “co-operation” and “managed conflict” under the umbrella of “winning without fighting”. A set of Chinese geo-strategic reasoning that addresses how the possession of capabilities in land power and sea power will interact to produce favorable balance of power corresponds to the country’s pattern of overseas activities. The book approaches the subject empirically based on original research into both writings for policy-making purposes, which indicate realistic assessments of world politics and of China’s international capacity, and also narratives for public consumption, which have less emphasis on selfinterest and realpolitik. The book concludes that Beijing’s self-privileging high morality might have the unfortunate consequence of reinforcing its own behavior which defies international order and which others disapprove of, thereby increasing the likelihood of non-armed and armed conflicts.

Tajikistan’s National Epics

Tajikistan’s National Epics PDF Author: Sadriddin Ayni
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000963284
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Sadriddin Ayni (1878–1954) was a Tajik intellectual, regarded by many as one of the most important writers in the country’s history. This book provides a translation of two historical monographs by Ayni: Is’yoni Muqanna (Muqanna’s Rebellion) and Qahramoni Khalqi Tojik Temurmalik (The Tajik People’s Hero Temur Malik). These works tell the story of two great Tajik heroes who fought against the Arabs and the Mongols. Besides the translations, the book discusses Ayni’s life and work, highlighting his role, especially through these two monographs, in awakening and strengthening Tajik national consciousness. In addition, the book provides detailed background information on the historical events portrayed in the epics.

The Way of the Barbarians

The Way of the Barbarians PDF Author: Shao-yun Yang
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295746017
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Shao-yun Yang challenges assumptions that the cultural and socioeconomic watershed of the Tang-Song transition (800–1127 CE) was marked by a xenophobic or nationalist hardening of ethnocultural boundaries in response to growing foreign threats. In that period, reinterpretations of Chineseness and its supposed antithesis, “barbarism,” were not straightforward products of political change but had their own developmental logic based in two interrelated intellectual shifts among the literati elite: the emergence of Confucian ideological and intellectual orthodoxy and the rise of neo-Confucian (daoxue) philosophy. New discourses emphasized the fluidity of the Chinese-barbarian dichotomy, subverting the centrality of cultural or ritual practices to Chinese identity and redefining the essence of Chinese civilization and its purported superiority. The key issues at stake concerned the acceptability of intellectual pluralism in a Chinese society and the importance of Confucian moral values to the integrity and continuity of the Chinese state. Through close reading of the contexts and changing geopolitical realities in which new interpretations of identity emerged, this intellectual history engages with ongoing debates over relevance of the concepts of culture, nation, and ethnicity to premodern China.

The Mystique of Transmission

The Mystique of Transmission PDF Author: Wendi L. Adamek
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231510020
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 595

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Book Description
The Mystique of Transmission is a close reading of a late-eighth-century Chan/Zen Buddhist hagiographical work, the Lidai fabao ji (Record of the Dharma-Jewel Through the Generations), and is its first English translation. The text is the only remaining relic of the little-known Bao Tang Chan school of Sichuan, and combines a sectarian history of Buddhism and Chan in China with an account of the eighth-century Chan master Wuzhu in Sichuan. Chinese religions scholar Wendi Adamek compares the Lidai fabao ji with other sources from the fourth through eighth centuries, chronicling changes in the doctrines and practices involved in transmitting medieval Chinese Buddhist teachings. While Adamek is concerned with familiar Chan themes like patriarchal genealogies and the ideology of sudden enlightenment, she also highlights topics that make Lidai fabao ji distinctive: formless practice, the inclusion of female practitioners, the influence of Daoist metaphysics, and connections with early Tibetan Buddhism. The Lidai fabao ji was unearthed in the early twentieth century in the Mogao caves at the Silk Road oasis of Dunhuang in northwestern China. Discovery of the Dunhuang manuscripts has been compared with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, as these documents have radically changed our understanding of medieval China and Buddhism. A crucial volume for students and scholars, The Mystique of Transmission offers a rare glimpse of a lost world and fills an important gap in the timeline of Chinese and Buddhist history.

The Oxford Handbook of Early China

The Oxford Handbook of Early China PDF Author: Elizabeth Childs-Johnson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199328374
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 768

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook on Early China brings 30 scholars together to cover early China from the Neolithic through Warring States periods (ca 5000-500BCE). The study is chronological and incorporates a multidisciplinary approach, covering topics from archaeology, anthropology, art history, architecture, music, and metallurgy, to literature, religion, paleography, cosmology, religion, prehistory, and history.

Ancient Mesopotamia

Ancient Mesopotamia PDF Author: A. Leo Oppenheim
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022617767X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
"This splendid work of scholarship . . . sums up with economy and power all that the written record so far deciphered has to tell about the ancient and complementary civilizations of Babylon and Assyria."—Edward B. Garside, New York Times Book Review Ancient Mesopotamia—the area now called Iraq—has received less attention than ancient Egypt and other long-extinct and more spectacular civilizations. But numerous small clay tablets buried in the desert soil for thousands of years make it possible for us to know more about the people of ancient Mesopotamia than any other land in the early Near East. Professor Oppenheim, who studied these tablets for more than thirty years, used his intimate knowledge of long-dead languages to put together a distinctively personal picture of the Mesopotamians of some three thousand years ago. Following Oppenheim's death, Erica Reiner used the author's outline to complete the revisions he had begun. "To any serious student of Mesopotamian civilization, this is one of the most valuable books ever written."—Leonard Cottrell, Book Week "Leo Oppenheim has made a bold, brave, pioneering attempt to present a synthesis of the vast mass of philological and archaeological data that have accumulated over the past hundred years in the field of Assyriological research."—Samuel Noah Kramer, Archaeology A. Leo Oppenheim, one of the most distinguished Assyriologists of our time, was editor in charge of the Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute and John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Chicago.

The Key to the Chronology of the Three Dynasties

The Key to the Chronology of the Three Dynasties PDF Author: David S. Nivison
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 86

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Book Description


Secrets of the Fallen Pagoda

Secrets of the Fallen Pagoda PDF Author: Eugene Yuejin Wang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The capital of Tang China (618 - 907), Chang'an (present day Xi'an), was a hub for economic and cultural exchange. Nearby lies the Famen Temple, one of the most revered Buddhist sites in China. A finger bone relic of the Buddha and magnificent Tang dynasty objects of gold, silver, ceramics, and glass were sealed within an underground crypt there. For more than 1000 years, these treasures were forgotten until their chance discovery in 1987. Together with objects from other leading museums in Shaanxi, the exhibition covered by this text is a rare showcase of Tang aesthetics and culture for the first time in Southeast Asia. This catalogue accompanies an exhibition at the Asian Civilisations Museum of treasures from the Famen Temple crypt and other Tang dynasty artworks. Essays examine relic worship at the Famen Temple and the Buddhist world of the Tang, the rationale for the arrangement of donations in the crypt chambers, and the Tang dynasties contacts with the wider world. Figures and murals from tombs, magnificent reliquary boxes, rare ceramics, and gold and silver metalwork tell the story of life and culture during the Tang.