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The Zuo Tradition / Zuozhuan Reader

Selections from China’s Earliest Narrative History

By Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li, David Schaberg

Zuo Tradition, China’s first great work of history, was completed by about 300 BCE and recounts events during a period of disunity from 722 to 468 BCE. The text, which plays a foundational role in...

Further Adventures on the Journey to the West

By Master of Silent Whistle Studio. Translated by Qiancheng Li and Robert E. Hegel . Introduction by Qiancheng Li

As the audacious Monkey King battles his way through a landscape of inexplicable places and unfamiliar passions, Further Adventures on the Journey to the West offers a wry, revisionist critique of the late-Ming fascination with...

The Objectionable Li Zhi

Fiction, Criticism, and Dissent in Late Ming China

By Rivi Handler-Spitz, Pauline C. Lee, Haun Saussy

Iconoclastic scholar Li Zhi (1527–1602) was a central figure in the cultural world of the late Ming dynasty. His provocative and controversial words and actions shaped print culture, literary practice, attitudes toward gender, and perspectives...

Divine, Demonic, and Disordered

Women without Men in Song Dynasty China

By Hsiao-wen Cheng

A variety of Chinese writings from the Song period (960–1279)—medical texts, religious treatises, fiction, and anecdotes—depict women who were considered peculiar because their sexual bodies did not belong to men. These were women who refused...

Rural Origins, City Lives

Class and Place in Contemporary China

By Roberta Zavoretti

Many of the millions of workers streaming in from rural China to jobs at urban factories soon find themselves in new kinds of poverty and oppression. Yet, their individual experiences are far more nuanced than...

The Edge of Knowing

Dreams, History, and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature

By Roy Bing Chan

Realism and the rhetoric of dreams intersected in modern Chinese literature from the May Fourth Era in the early twentieth century through the period just following the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. The...

Fir and Empire

The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China

By Ian M. Miller. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

The disappearance of China’s naturally occurring forests is one of the most significant environmental shifts in the country’s history, one often blamed on imperial demand for lumber. China’s early modern forest history is typically viewed...

What the Emperor Built

Architecture and Empire in the Early Ming

By Aurelia Campbell

One of the most famous rulers in Chinese history, the Yongle emperor (r. 1402–24) gained renown for constructing Beijing’s magnificent Forbidden City, directing ambitious naval expeditions, and creating the world’s largest encyclopedia. What the Emperor...

A Fashionable Century

Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing

By Rachel Silberstein

Clothing and accessories from nineteenth-century China reveal much about women’s participation in the commercialization of textile handicrafts and the flourishing of urban popular culture. Focusing on women’s work and fashion, A Fashionable Century presents an...

Citizens of Beauty

Drawing Democratic Dreams in Republican China

By Louise Edwards

In the early twentieth century China’s most famous commercial artists promoted new cultural and civic values through sketches of idealized modern women in journals, newspapers, and compendia called One Hundred Illustrated Beauties. This genre drew...

Circulating the Code

Print Media and Legal Knowledge in Qing China

By Ting Zhang

Contrary to longtime assumptions about the insular nature of imperial China’s legal system, Circulating the Code demonstrates that in the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) most legal books were commercially published and available to anyone who could...

The Rise of West Lake

A Cultural Landmark in the Song Dynasty

By Xiaolin Duan

Lovely West Lake, near scenic Hangzhou on China’s east coast, has been celebrated as a major tourist site since the twelfth century. Now as then, visitors boat to its islands, stroll through its gardens, worship...

The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons

A Seventeenth-Century Novel

By Kristin Ingrid Fryklund, Mark Edward Lewis, Brigitte Baptandier

The Lady of Linshui—the goddess of women, childbirth, and childhood—is still venerated in south China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. Her story evolved from the life of Chen Jinggu in the eighth century and blossomed in...

Taiwan in Dynamic Transition

Nation Building and Democratization

By Ryan Dunch, Ashley Esarey, Thomas B. Gold

Following a remarkable transition from authoritarian rule to robust democracy, Taiwan has grown into a prosperous but widely unrecognized nation-state for which no uncontested sovereign space exists. Increasingly vigorous assertions of Taiwanese identity expose the...

Great Qing

Painting in China, 1644-1911

By Claudia Brown

Addressing the previous lack of a comprehensive English-language study of Qing painting, art historian Claudia Brown’s account ranges from the tumultuous Ming–Qing transition to the end of imperial rule. In response to omissions in previous...

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...

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...

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’...

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...

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...