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Chinese Characters across Asia

How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese

By Zev Handel

A fascinating story of writing across cultures and time

While other ancient nonalphabetic scripts—Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Mayan hieroglyphs—are long extinct, Chinese characters, invented over three thousand years ago, are today used by well over...

From Forest Farm to Sawmill

Stories of Labor, Gender, and the Chinese State 

By Shuxuan Zhou

A worker-centered, woman-centered history of China's economic transformation

Socialist China’s state forestry and timber industries employed men as state workers and women as family dependents and collective workers who, beginning in the 1950s, turned rural land...

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...

Material Contradictions in Mao's China

By Jennifer Altehenger, Denise Y. Ho

An excavation of the sociocultural, economic, and political history of everyday commodities

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...

Divine, Demonic, and Disordered

Women without Men in Song Dynasty China

By Hsiao-wen Cheng

Female chastity stirs trouble in medieval China

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...

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...

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...

Qing Governors and Their Provinces

The Evolution of Territorial Administration in China, 1644-1796

By R. Kent Guy

During the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the province emerged as an important element in the management of the expanding Chinese empire, with governors -- those in charge of these increasingly influential administrative units -- playing key...

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...

On Cold Mountain

A Buddhist Reading of the Hanshan Poems

By Paul Rouzer

In this first serious study of Hanshan (“Cold Mountain”), Paul Rouzer discusses some seventy poems of the iconic Chinese poet who lived sometime during the Tang dynasty (618–907). Hanshan’s poems gained a large readership in...

Puer Tea

Ancient Caravans and Urban Chic

By Jinghong Zhang

Puer tea has been grown for centuries in the “Six Great Tea Mountains” of Yunnan Province, and in imperial China it was a prized commodity, traded to Tibet by horse or mule caravan via the...

Forgery and Impersonation in Imperial China

Popular Deceptions and the High Qing State

By Mark P. McNicholas

Across eighteenth-century China a wide range of common people forged government documents or pretended to be officials or other agents of the state. This examination of case records and law codes traces the legal meanings...

The Interweaving of Rituals

Funerals in the Cultural Exchange between China and Europe

By Nicolas Standaert

The death of the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci in China in 1610 was the occasion for demonstrations of European rituals appropriate for a Catholic priest and also of Chinese rituals appropriate to the country hosting...

The Sichuan Frontier and Tibet

Imperial Strategy in the Early Qing

By Yingcong Dai

During China's last dynasty, the Qing (1644-1911), the empire's remote, bleak, and politically insignificant Southwest rose to become a strategically vital area. This study of the imperial government's handling of the southwestern frontier illuminates issues...

Scenic Spots

Chinese Tourism, the State, and Cultural Authority

By Pal Nyiri

Twenty years ago, commercial tourism in the People’s Republic of China hardly existed. Today, China has a burgeoning tourist industry, characterized by a unique style with deep roots in traditional Chinese culture. Scenic Spots is...

The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom

Rebellion and the Blasphemy of Empire

By Thomas H. Reilly

Occupying much of imperial China’s Yangzi River heartland and costing more than twenty million lives, the Taiping Rebellion (1851-64) was no ordinary peasant revolt. What most distinguished this dramatic upheaval from earlier rebellions were the...

Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China

By Antje Richter

Honorable Mention for the 2016 Kayden Book Award

This first book-length study in Chinese or any Western language of personal letters and letter-writing in premodern China focuses on the earliest period (ca. 3rd-6th cent. CE)...

The Story of Han Xiangzi

The Alchemical Adventures of a Daoist Immortal

By Yang Erzeng. Translated by Philip Clart

In this seventeenth-century Chinese novel, Han Xiangzi, best known as one of the Eight Immortals, seeks and achieves immortality and then devotes himself to converting his materialistic, politically ambitious Confucian uncle—Han Yu, a real historical figure—to...

Lijiang Stories

Shamans, Taxi Drivers, and Runaway Brides in Reform-Era China

By Emily Chao. Foreword by Stevan Harrell

Lijiang, a once-sleepy market town in southwest China, has become a magnet for tourism since the mid-1990s. Drawing on stories about taxi drivers, reluctant brides, dogmeat, and shamanism, Emily Chao illustrates how biopolitics and the...

Women’s Poetry of Late Imperial China

Transforming the Inner Chambers

By Xiaorong Li

This study of poetry by women in late imperial China examines the metamorphosis of the trope of the "inner chambers" (gui), to which women were confined in traditional Chinese households, and which in literature were...