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An Ecological History of Modern China

By Stevan Harrell

Is environmental degradation an inevitable result of economic development? Can ecosystems be restored once government officials and the public are committed to doing so? These questions are at the heart of An Ecological History of...

Good Formulas

Empirical Evidence in Mid-Imperial Chinese Medical Texts

By Ruth Yun-Ju Chen

Why and how did the strategy of documenting medical practices through personal experience rise to prominence in China? This question is at the heart of Good Formulas, the first book-length study of the use of...

Miscellany of the South Seas

A Chinese Scholar’s Chronicle of Shipwreck and Travel through 1830s Vietnam

By Cai Tinglan. Translated by Kathlene Baldanza and Zhao Lu

In 1835 young Chinese scholar Cai Tinglan was caught in a typhoon while sailing across the Taiwan Strait. He and his shipmates spent a harrowing week at sea before drifting to the coast of central...

Modified Bodies, Material Selves

Beauty Ideals in Post-Reform Shanghai

By Julie E. Starr

Thin body, white skin, and big eyes. Such beauty ideals are ubiquitous across Shanghai, where salons and weight-loss clinics offering an array of products and treatment options beckon city dwellers with promises of a "better...

A Thorough Exploration in Historiography / Shitong

By Liu Zhiji. Translated and Introduced by Victor Cunrui Xiong

In the early eighth century, frustrated with the authorities but still hoping to gain immortality through his future oeuvre, the Tang court historian Liu Zhiji set out to write Shitong, in which he would rigorously...

China's Hidden Century

1796-1912

By Jessica Harrison-Hall, Julia Lovell

Cultural creativity in China between 1796 and 1912 demonstrated extraordinary resilience in a time of warfare, land shortages, famine, and uprisings. Innovation can be seen in material culture (including print, painting, calligraphy, textiles, jewelry, ceramics,...

A Century of Modern Chinese Poetry

An Anthology

By Michelle Yeh, Zhangbin Li, Frank Stewart

This volume—a completely overhauled and updated version of Michelle Yeh’s 1992 classic Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry—brings together modern poetry from the Chinese-speaking world dating from the 1910s to the 2010s. Featuring the work of...

The Ghost in the City

Luo Ping and the Craft of Painting in Eighteenth-Century China

By Michele Matteini

In 1771 the artist Luo Ping (1733–99) left his native Yangzhou to relocate to the burgeoning hub of Beijing’s Southern City. Over two decades, he became the favored artist of a cosmopolitan community of scholars...

Porcelain for the Emperor

Manufacture and Technocracy in Qing China

By Kai Jun Chen

The exquisite ceramic ware produced at the Imperial Porcelain Manufactory at Jingdezhen in southern China functioned as a kind of visual propaganda for the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) court. Porcelain for the Emperor charts the career...

Spatial Dunhuang

Experiencing the Mogao Caves

By Wu Hung

Constructed over a millennium from the fourth to fourteenth centuries CE near Dunhuang, an ancient border town along the Silk Road in northwest China, the Mogao Caves comprise the largest, most continuously created, and best-preserved...

Chinese Autobiographical Writing

An Anthology of Personal Accounts

By Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Cong Ellen Zhang, Ping Yao

Personal accounts help us understand notions of self, interpersonal relations, and historical events. Chinese Autobiographical Writing contains full translations of works by fifty individuals that illuminate the history and conventions of writing about oneself in...

Material Contradictions in Mao's China

By Jennifer Altehenger, Denise Y. Ho

The growth of markets and consumerism in China’s post-Mao era of political and economic reform is a story familiar to many. By contrast, the Mao period (1949–1976)—rightly framed as a time of scarcity—initially appears to...

The Tibetan Nun Mingyur Peldrön

A Woman of Power and Privilege

By Alison Melnick Dyer

Born to a powerful family and educated at the prominent Mindröling Monastery, the Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher Mingyur Peldrön (1699–1769) leveraged her privileged status and overcame significant adversity, including exile during a civil war,...

The Many Lives of the First Emperor of China

By Anthony J. Barbieri-Low

Ying Zheng, founder of the Qin empire, is recognized as a pivotal figure in world history, alongside other notable conquerors such as Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and Julius Caesar. His accomplishments include conquest of...

A Ming Confucian’s World

Selections from Miscellaneous Records from the Bean Garden

By Lu Rong. Translated and introduced by Mark Halperin

A forgotten century marks the years between the Ming dynasty's (1368–1644) turbulent founding and its sixteenth-century age of exploration and economic transformation. In this period of social stability, retired scholar-official Lu Rong chronicled his observations...

Temples in the Cliffside

Buddhist Art in Sichuan

By Sonya S. Lee

At sixty-two meters the Leshan Buddha in southwest China is the world’s tallest premodern statue. Carved out of a riverside cliff in the eighth century, it has evolved from a religious center to a UNESCO...

Pure and True

The Everyday Politics of Ethnicity for China's Hui Muslims

By David R. Stroup

The Chinese Communist Party points to the Hui—China’s largest Muslim ethnic group—as a model ethnic minority and touts its harmonious relations with the group as an example of the Party’s great success in ethnic politics....

Garden of Eloquence / Shuoyuan說苑

By Liu Xiang. Translated and Introduced by Eric Henry

In 17 BCE the Han dynasty archivist Liu Xiang presented to the throne a collection of some seven hundred items of varying length, mostly quasi-historical anecdotes and narratives, that he deemed essential reading for wise...

Ordering the Myriad Things

From Traditional Knowledge to Scientific Botany in China

By Nicholas K. Menzies. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

China’s vast and ancient body of documented knowledge about plants includes horticultural manuals and monographs, comprehensive encyclopedias, geographies, and specialized anthologies of verse and prose written by keen observers of nature. Until the late nineteenth...

Artisans in Early Imperial China

By Anthony J. Barbieri-Low

Early China is best known for the dazzling material artifacts it has left behind. These terracotta figures, gilt-bronze lamps, and other material remnants of the Chinese past unearthed by archaeological excavations are often viewed without...