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Eulogy for Burying a Crane and the Art of Chinese Calligraphy

By Lei Xue

Eulogy for Burying a Crane (Yi he ming) is perhaps the most eccentric piece in China’s calligraphic canon. Apparently marking the burial of a crane, the large inscription, datable to 514 CE, was once carved...

China Gothic

The Bishop of Beijing and His Cathedral

By Anthony E. Clark. Foreword by Leland M. Roth

As China struggled to redefine itself at the turn of the twentieth century, nationalism, religion, and material culture intertwined in revealing ways. This phenomenon is evident in the twin biographies of North China’s leading Catholic...

The Way of the Barbarians

Redrawing Ethnic Boundaries in Tang and Song China

By Shao-yun Yang

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...

Chinese Funerary Biographies

An Anthology of Remembered Lives

By Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Ping Yao, Cong Ellen Zhang

Tens of thousands of epitaphs, or funerary biographies, survive from imperial China. Engraved on stone and placed in a grave, they typically focus on the deceased’s biography and exemplary words and deeds, expressing the survivors’...

Where Dragon Veins Meet

The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe

By Stephen H. Whiteman

In 1702, the second emperor of the Qing dynasty ordered construction of a new summer palace in Rehe (now Chengde, Hebei) to support his annual tours north among the court’s Inner Mongolian allies. The Mountain...

Two Centuries of Manchu Women Poets

An Anthology

By Wilt L. Idema

This anthology presents substantial selections from the work of twenty Manchu women poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The poems, inspired by their daily life and reflections, provide fascinating insights into the experiences and...

Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor

A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Story Collection

By Aina the Layman. With Ziran the Eccentric Wanderer. Robert E. Hegel

Written around 1660, the unique Chinese short story collection Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor (Doupeng xianhua), by the author known only as Aina the Layman, uses the seemingly innocuous setting of neighbors swapping yarns...

Symptoms of an Unruly Age

Li Zhi and Cultures of Early Modernity

By Rivi Handler-Spitz

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 national boundaries,...

The Kongs of Qufu

The Descendants of Confucius in Late Imperial China

By Christopher S. Agnew

The city of Qufu, in north China’s Shandong Province, is famous as the hometown of Kong Qiu (551–479 BCE)—known as Confucius in English and as Kongzi or Kong Fuzi in Chinese. In The Kongs of...

Tasting Paradise on Earth

Jiangnan Foodways

By Jin Feng

Preparing and consuming food is an integral part of identity formation, which in contemporary China embodies tension between fast-forward modernization and cultural nostalgia. Jin Feng’s wide-ranging exploration of cities in the Lower Yangzi Delta—or Jiangnan,...

The Nuosu Book of Origins

A Creation Epic from Southwest China

By Mark Bender, Qingchun Luo, Jjivot Zopqu

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295745701.s01

The Nuosu people, who were once overlords of vast tracts of farmland and forest in the uplands of southern Sichuan and neighboring provinces, are the largest division of the Yi ethnic group...

The White Lotus War

Rebellion and Suppression in Late Imperial China

By Yingcong Dai

The 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...

Improvised City

Architecture and Governance in Shanghai, 1843-1937

By Cole Roskam

For nearly one hundred years, Shanghai was an international treaty port in which the extraterritorial rights of foreign governments shaped both architecture and infrastructure, and it merits examination as one of the most complex and...

Empire of Style

Silk and Fashion in Tang China

By BuYun Chen

Tang dynasty (618–907) China hummed with cosmopolitan trends. Its capital at Chang’an was the most populous city in the world and was connected via the Silk Road with the critical markets and thriving cultures of...

Heroines of the Qing

Exemplary Women Tell Their Stories

By Binbin Yang

Heroines of the Qing introduces an array of Chinese women from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were powerful, active subjects of their own lives and who wrote themselves as the heroines of their exemplary...

State Power in China, 900-1325

By Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Paul Jakov Smith

This collection provides new ways to understand how state power was exercised during the overlapping Liao, Song, Jin, and Yuan dynasties. Through a set of case studies, State Power in China, 900-1325 examines large questions...

Bronze and Stone

The Cult of Antiquity in Song Dynasty China

By Yunchiahn C. Sena

Despite China’s long tradition of venerating the past as the ultimate source of cultural authority, the discourse of antiquity prior to the Song period (960–1279) demonstrated little concern for ancient objects. With a focus on...

Footbinding as Fashion

Ethnicity, Labor, and Status in Traditional China

By John Robert Shepherd

Previous studies of the practice of footbinding in imperial China have theorized that it expressed ethnic identity or that it served an economic function. By analyzing the popularity of footbinding in different places and times,...

Mouse vs. Cat in Chinese Literature

Tales and Commentary

By Wilt L. Idema, Haiyan Lee

In literatures worldwide, animal fables have been analyzed for their revealingly anthropomorphic views, but until now little attention has been given to the animal tales of China. The complex, competitive relationship between rodents (vilified as...

Jade Mountains and Cinnabar Pools

The History of Travel Literature in Imperial China

By James M. Hargett

First-hand accounts of travel provide windows into places unknown to the reader, or new ways of seeing familiar places. In Jade Mountains and Cinnabar Pools, the first book-length treatment in English of Chinese travel literature...