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Technicians and Artisans and Heaven-and-Earth reconstructs memories of significant but often overlooked figures from a remarkably diverse yet understudied period of Chinese history. The book includes translations of three biographical collections from the official dynastic histories of the Northern Wei, Northern Zhou, and Sui featuring the lives of “technicians and artisans.” Through a comparative, intertextual, and literary analysis of these works, Stephan N. Kory not only sheds light on the roles and functions of diviners, physicians, and craftsmen in the imperial courts of mid-medieval North China, but also provides us with fascinating insights into medieval Chinese court life and society.
This book systematically traces the development of Chinese historiography from the 2nd century B.C. to the 19th century A.D. Refusing to fit the Chinese historical narration into the modern Western discourse, the author highlights the significant questions that concern traditional historians, their philosophical foundations, their development over three thousand years and their influence on the intelligentsia. China is a country defined in terms of its history and its historians have worked hard to record the past. However, this book approaches Chinese history from the very beginning not only as a way of recording, but also as a way of dealing with the past in order to orient the people of the present in the temporal dimension of their lives. This book was listed as the key textbook of the “Eleventh Five-year Plan” for college students in China.
Chinese traditions of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism have a profoundly philosophical dimension. The three traditions are frequently referred to as three paths of moral teachings. In this book, Mou provides a clear account of the textual corpus that emerges to define each of these traditions and how this canonical axis was augmented by a continuing commentarial tradition as each generation reauthorized the written core for their own time and place. In his careful exegesis, Mou lays out the differences between the more religious reading of these traditions with their defining practices that punctuate the human journey through life, and the more intellectual and philosophical treatment of t...
Social Orders and Social Landscapes marks a new direction in research for Eurasian archaeology that focuses on how people lived in their local environment and interacted with their near and distant neighbours, rather than on overarching comparisons of archaeological culture complexes. Stemming from the 2005 University of Chicago Eurasian Archaeology Conference, the papers collected here reflect this new research agenda, though the way in which each author addressed the theme of the conference, and thus the book, was strikingly varied. This diversity arises out of the field’s intellectual flux driven by the principled engagement of the rich analytical traditions of the Soviet/CIS, Anglo-Ame...
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This book employs a biographical approach to comprehensively study a set of Tang era-tomb guardian figurines, known as the Four Gods (Sishen), comprising a pair of warriors (Dangkuang and Dangye) and a pair of hybrid beasts (Zuming and Dizhou). These objects were exclusively used by officials until 841 AD and were mainly found in capitals then. They disappeared in the 9th century AD. The book is divided into three sections. Part one focuses on their symbolism through names, images, burial contexts, associated ritual regulations, and the interplay of all of these, revealing their dual significance – apotropaic and political, tied to ritual propriety, nuo exorcism, yin-yang divination, and m...
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The ingredients, cooks, techniques and tools that have shaped our love of food.