Chinese Steles

Chinese Steles PDF Author: Dorothy C. Wong
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824827830
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Buddhist steles represent an important subset of early Chinese Buddhist art that flourished during the Northern and Southern Dynasties period (386–581). More than two hundred Chinese Buddhist steles are known to have survived. Their brilliant imagery has long captivated scholars, yet until now the Buddhist stele as a unique art form has received little scholarly attention. Dorothy Wong rectifies that insufficiency by providing in this well-illustrated volume the first comprehensive investigation of this group of Buddhist monuments. She traces the ancient roots of the Chinese stele tradition and investigates the process by which Chinese steles were adapted for Buddhist use. She arranges the known corpus of Buddhist steles into broad chronological and regional groupings and analyzes not only their form and content but also the nexus of complex issues surrounding this art form—from cultural symbolism to the interrelations between religious doctrine and artistic expression, economic production, patronage, and the synthesis of native and foreign art styles. In her analysis of Buddhism’s dialogue with native traditions, Wong demonstrates how the Chinese artistic idiom planted the seeds for major achievements in figural and landscape arts in the ensuing Sui and Tang periods.

Chinese Steles

Chinese Steles PDF Author: Dorothy C. Wong
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824827830
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Get Book

Book Description
Buddhist steles represent an important subset of early Chinese Buddhist art that flourished during the Northern and Southern Dynasties period (386–581). More than two hundred Chinese Buddhist steles are known to have survived. Their brilliant imagery has long captivated scholars, yet until now the Buddhist stele as a unique art form has received little scholarly attention. Dorothy Wong rectifies that insufficiency by providing in this well-illustrated volume the first comprehensive investigation of this group of Buddhist monuments. She traces the ancient roots of the Chinese stele tradition and investigates the process by which Chinese steles were adapted for Buddhist use. She arranges the known corpus of Buddhist steles into broad chronological and regional groupings and analyzes not only their form and content but also the nexus of complex issues surrounding this art form—from cultural symbolism to the interrelations between religious doctrine and artistic expression, economic production, patronage, and the synthesis of native and foreign art styles. In her analysis of Buddhism’s dialogue with native traditions, Wong demonstrates how the Chinese artistic idiom planted the seeds for major achievements in figural and landscape arts in the ensuing Sui and Tang periods.

Nomads on Pilgrimage

Nomads on Pilgrimage PDF Author: Isabelle Charleux
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004297782
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 495

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Book Description
Nomads on Pilgrimage: Mongols on Wutaishan is a social history of the Mongols’ pilgrimages to one of the main Buddhist mountain of China in late imperial and Republican times (1800-1940).

On Telling Images of China

On Telling Images of China PDF Author: Shane McCausland
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888139436
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
The essays in this volume address a diverse range of issues in China’s narrative art and visual culture mainly from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) to the present. These studies attend to the complex ways in which images circulate in pictorial media and across boundaries between ‘high art’ and popular culture—images in paintings, prints, stone engravings and posters, as well as in film and video art. In addition, the authors examine the roles of ancient exemplary stories and textual narratives, as well as their reiteration in the visual arts in early modern and modern social and political contexts. The volume is divided into three sections: Representing Paradigms, Interpreting Literary Themes and Narratives, and the Medium and Modernity. While the essays in each section deal with concerns in the field of China’s art history, an editors’ introduction serves to position the topic of narrative art and to introduce definitions and genre issues which run through the book. As a whole, the volume invites reflection on the intrinsic nature of narratives and their pictorial lives, and presents new research which challenges established views and paradigms.

The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds

The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds PDF Author: Jonathan D. Spence
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393247708
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
"Like everything else written by Jonathan Spence, The Chan's Great Continent is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in China. Spence is one of the greatest Sinologists of our time, and his work is both authoritative and highly readable." —Los Angeles Times Book Review China has transfixed the West since the earliest contacts between these civilizations. With his characteristic elegance and insight, Jonathan Spence explores how the West has understood China over seven centuries. Ranging from Marco Polo's own depiction of China and the mighty Khan, Kublai, in the 1270s to the China sightings of three twentieth-century writers of acknowledged genius-Kafka, Borges, and Calvino-Spence conveys Western thought on China through a remarkable array of expression. Peopling Spence's account are Iberian adventurers, Enlightenment thinkers, spinners of the dreamy cult of Chinoiserie, and American observers such as Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Ezra Pound, and Eugene O'Neill. Taken together, these China sightings tell us as much about the self-image of the West as about China. "Wonderful. . . . Spence brilliantly demonstrates [how] generation after generation of Westerners [have] asked themselves, 'What is it . . . that held this astonishing, diverse, and immensely populous land together?' "--New York Times Book Review

Odyssey of Culture

Odyssey of Culture PDF Author: Yan Zhou
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3662454114
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
This book is the first case study on Wenda Gu that systematically investigates the cultural and artistic context of his life and works, examining selected images of his artwork spanning from the late 1970s to the early 21st century. It is the first monograph to provide a comprehensive and profound study of a Chinese contemporary artist. In the 1980s, the School of Hermeneutics attempted to launch a discursive revolution. Vanguard artists believed that the visual art revolution was an integral part of the critique of culture because it tended to subvert and rebuild the cultural tradition at a discursive level. This book, using a case study on Wenda Gu as representative of Chinese avant-garde, investigates the centrality of culture in art, providing readers with insights on the origin, rationale and methodology of Chinese contemporary art.

The Manchu Language at Court and in the Bureaucracy under the Qianlong Emperor

The Manchu Language at Court and in the Bureaucracy under the Qianlong Emperor PDF Author: Mårten Söderblom Saarela
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004687734
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
This is the first book-length study of the roles played by the Manchu language at the center of the Qing empire at the height of its power in the eighteenth century. It presents a revisionist account of Manchu not as a language in decline, but as extensively and consciously used language in a variety of areas. It treats the use, discussion, regulation, and philological study of Manchu at the court of an emperor who cared deeply for the maintenance and history of the language of his dynasty.

Journal of Chinese Religions

Journal of Chinese Religions PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description


The Story of a Stele

The Story of a Stele PDF Author: Michael Keevak
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9789622098954
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
The authors start with a prologue 'The Story of a Stone' which covers its discovery, the century of kircher, 18th-century problems and controversies and the return of the missionaries, and finish with an epilogue 'The Da Qin Temple'.

Persian Christians at the Chinese Court

Persian Christians at the Chinese Court PDF Author: R. Todd Godwin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786733161
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The Xi'an Stele, erected in Tang China's capital in 781, describes in both Syriac and Chinese the existence of Christian communities in northern China. While scholars have so far considered the Stele exclusively in relation to the Chinese cultural and historical context, Todd Godwin here demonstrates that it can only be fully understood by reconstructing the complex connections that existed between the Church of the East, Sasanian aristocratic culture and the Tang Empire (617-907) between the fall of the Sasanian Persian Empire (225-651) and the birth of the Abbasid Caliphate (762-1258). Through close textual re-analysis of the Stele and by drawing on ancient sources in Syriac, Greek, Arabic and Chinese, Godwin demonstrates that Tang China (617-907) was a cosmopolitan milieu where multiple religious traditions, namely Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism and Christianity, formed zones of elite culture. Syriac Christianity in fact remained powerful in Persia throughout the period, and Christianity - not Zoroastrianism - was officially regarded by the Tang government as 'The Persian Religion'.Persian Christians at the Chinese Court uncovers the role played by Syriac Christianity in the economic and cultural integration of late Sasanian Iran and China, and is important reading for all scholars of the Church of the East, China and the Middle East in the medieval period.

The Stele Inscriptions of Chʻin Shih-huang

The Stele Inscriptions of Chʻin Shih-huang PDF Author: Martin Kern
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : zh-CN
Pages : 240

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Book Description