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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...

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,...

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...

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...

Fir and Empire

The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China

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

A CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE

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...

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,...

Novel Medicine

Healing, Literature, and Popular Knowledge in Early Modern China

By Andrew Schonebaum

By examining the dynamic interplay between discourses of fiction and medicine, Novel Medicine demonstrates how fiction incorporated, created, and disseminated medical knowledge in China, beginning in the sixteenth century. Critical readings of fictional and medical...

Jesuits and Matriarchs

Domestic Worship in Early Modern China

By Nadine Amsler

In early modern China, Jesuit missionaries associated with the male elite of Confucian literati in order to proselytize more freely, but they had limited contact with women, whose ritual spaces were less accessible. Historians of...

Many Faces of Mulian

The Precious Scrolls of Late Imperial China

By Rostislav Berezkin

The story of Mulian rescuing his mother’s soul from hell has evolved as a narrative over several centuries in China, especially in the baojuan (precious scrolls) genre. This genre, a prosimetric narrative in vernacular language,...

Perpetual Happiness

The Ming Emperor Yongle

By Shih-shan Henry Tsai

The reign of Emperor Yongle, or “Perpetual Happiness,” was one of the most dramatic and significant in Chinese history. It began with civil war and a bloody coup, saw the construction of the Forbidden City,...

The Scholar and the State

Fiction as Political Discourse in Late Imperial China

By Liangyan Ge

In imperial China, intellectuals devoted years of their lives to passing rigorous examinations in order to obtain a civil service position in the state bureaucracy. This traditional employment of the literati class conferred social power...

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...

Confucian Image Politics

Masculine Morality in Seventeenth-Century China

By Ying Zhang

During the Ming-Qing transition (roughly from the 1570s to the 1680s), literati-officials in China employed public forms of writing, art, and social spectacle to present positive moral images of themselves and negative images of their...

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...

The Mandate of Heaven and The Great Ming Code

By Jiang Yonglin

After overthrowing the Mongol Yuan dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), proclaimed that he had obtained the Mandate of Heaven (Tianming), enabling establishment of a spiritual orientation and social agenda for...

Vignettes from the Late Ming

A Hsiao-p’in Anthology

By Yang Ye

This anthology presents seventy translated and annotated short essays, or hsiao-p’in, by fourteen well-known sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Chinese writers. Hsiao-p’in, characterized by spontaneity and brevity, were a relatively informal variation on the established classical prose...