Speaking of Yangzhou
Speaking of Yangzhou

Author: Antonia Finnane

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-03-17

Total Pages: 487

ISBN-13: 1684174007

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The early-twentieth-century essayist Zhu Ziqing once wrote that he had only to mention the name of his hometown of Yangzhou to someone in Beijing and the person would respond, "A fine place! A fine place!" Yangzhou was indeed one of the great cities of late imperial China, and its name carries rich historical and cultural resonances. Even today Yangzhou continues to evoke images of artists, men of letters, great merchant families, scenic waterways, an urban environment of considerable grace and charm, and a history imbued with color and romance. This book is in some ways a biography of a city that acquired a personality, even a gender, and became an actor in its own history. Yangzhou invites attention because its place in China's cultural iconography tells us not only of one city's vicissitudes and fortunes but also of changes in the geography of the Chinese imagination. The author examines the city's place in the history of the late imperial era and of the meanings that accrued to Yangzhou over time. She argues that the actual construction of the city--its academies of learning, its philanthropic institutions, its gardens, its teahouses, and its brothels--underpinned the construction of a certain idea of Yangzhou.

Speaking of Yangzhou
Speaking of Yangzhou

Author: Antonia Finnane

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 500

ISBN-13:

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This is in some ways a biography of a city that acquired a personality, even a gender, and became an actor in its own history. The author examines the city's place in the history of the late imperial era and of the meanings that accrued to Yangzhou.

Changing Clothes in China
Changing Clothes in China

Author: Antonia Finnane

Publisher: Hurst Publishers

Published: 2023-05-30

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 1787387828

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Historians have long regarded fashion as something peculiarly Western. In this surprising, sumptuously illustrated book, Antonia Finnane challenges this view, which she argues is based on nineteenth- and twentieth-century representations of Chinese dress as traditional and unchanging. Fashions, she shows, were part of Chinese life in the late imperial era, even if a fashion industry was not then apparent. In the early twentieth century the key features of modern fashion became evident, particularly in Shanghai, and rapidly changing dress styles showed the effects. The volatility of Chinese dress throughout the twentieth century matched vicissitudes in national politics. Finnane describes in detail how the close-fitting jacket and high collar of the 1911 Revolutionary period, the skirt and jacket-blouse of the May Fourth era, and the military style popular in the Cultural Revolution gave way finally to the variegated, globalized wardrobe of today. She brilliantly connects China’s modernization and global visibility with changes in dress, offering a vivid portrait of the complex, subtle, and sometimes contradictory ways the people of China have worn their nation on their backs.

Yangzhou, A Place in Literature
Yangzhou, A Place in Literature

Author: Roland Altenburger

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2015-01-31

Total Pages: 530

ISBN-13: 0824854462

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One of the famous canal cities of the world and a former center of culture, trade, transportation, and fashion, the old town of Yangzhou evokes romantic bridges, beautiful courtesans, fine gardens, and eccentric painters. It is also remembered as a war-torn ruin after the Qing conquest and the Taiping Rebellion, and as a city in decline as trade shifted to seaports and railways. Yangzhou, A Place in Literature, the first anthology to center on a Chinese city and its local region, offers a wealth of literary, semi-literary, and oral texts representing social life over three hundred years of dramatic change between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. The selections in this volume represent a wide range of literary forms and styles, both elite and popular, with subjects ranging from literature, history, theater, and art to the history of architecture and gardening, and of material culture at large. Readers will come across rarely found details of everyday life, the sights, smells, and sounds of the lanes and teahouses, a world of taverns, pilgrimages, communal baths, fish markets, salt merchants, acting troupes, and food in one of the wealthiest cities of imperial China. Each text has an introductory essay and rich textual notes by an expert in the relevant field. The general introduction provides an in-depth discussion of the roles of the local in historical, cultural, literary, and linguistic terms, as mirrored by the wide range of translated sources collected in this volume. The selected texts are historically and intellectually important in their own right, but the volume greatly enhances their collective value by combining them, arranging them in historical sequence, and providing a dense network of cross-references that invite comparisons and reveal contrasts in style, form, focus, and topic. With its compelling accounts of material culture, urban spaces, entertainment, and gender, Yangzhou, A Place in Literature will fascinate scholars and students alike by opening a window to the rich cultural history of Yangzhou. The volume can serve as a textbook for courses on traditional and modern Chinese literature, popular culture, the city, or social history. It will be of great interest to scholars of East Asian studies, as well as to those in a variety of comparative fields, such as urban studies, theater studies, and gender studies.

The Order of Places
The Order of Places

Author: Yongtao Du

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2015-02-24

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 9004288406

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There were over a thousand counties and prefectures in late imperial China; each loomed large in the hearts and minds of the local natives, and had a history of its own. The Order of Places tells a story of how these places were ordered by the long-lived imperial state, and then re-ordered during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries as geographical mobility increased. At the center of the story are the mobile merchants from south China’s Huizhou Prefecture, then the most prominent merchant group in China. The story presents the dynamics of geography in the world’s most enduring empire on the eve of its entry into modern history, as the author explores the changing relationships between people and the place they called “home”, between local place and the life-world the Chinese called “all-under-Heaven,” and between local places.

Ascendant Peace in the Four Seas
Ascendant Peace in the Four Seas

Author: Ye Xiaoqing

Publisher: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press

Published: 2012-07-20

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9629964570

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"On an autumn morning in 1793, Lord Macartney waited to be ushered into the imperial summer retreat to take part in the celebration of the Qianlong Emperor's 82nd birthday. It was a long day; the celebration drama, Ascendant Peace in the Four Seas, lasted five hours. There were many scenes of fish, turtles and other sea creatures, and Macartney guessed it must have had something to do with the marriage between the ocean and land. He could not have been more wrong…" For the Qing court, entertaining foreign visitors was only one of the numerous ritual and political purposes dramas served. Delving into a rich collection of firsthand materials, the author meticulously excavates and combs historical data including court records, eunuchs' memoirs, pictorial archives of opera costumes, and period news. She investigates the development of imperial drama and its influence on the Peking Opera, as well as the function and system of imperial organizations responsible for drama. Also discussed are the complex roles of the actors on and off stage, and the broader issues of cultural and political influence intertwined with the performances themselves. The book thus presents us not only an art history of Peking Opera, but also a vivid scrollpainting of the socialcultural life both in and beyond the Forbidden City.

Hua Yan (1682-1756) and the Making of the Artist in Early Modern China
Hua Yan (1682-1756) and the Making of the Artist in Early Modern China

Author: Kristen L. Chiem

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-05-25

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9004429468

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Hua Yan (1682-1756) and the Making of the Artist in Early Modern China explores the relationships between the artist, local society, and artistic practice during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). Arranged as an investigation of the artist Hua Yan’s work at a pivotal moment in eighteenth-century society, this book considers his paintings and poetry in early eighteenth-century Hangzhou, mid-eighteenth-century Yangzhou, and finally their nineteenth-century afterlife in Shanghai. By investigating Hua Yan’s struggle as a marginalized artist—both at his time and in the canon of Chinese art—this study draws attention to the implications of seeing and being seen as an artist in early modern China.

A Court on Horseback
A Court on Horseback

Author: Michael G Chang

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-03-23

Total Pages: 574

ISBN-13: 1684174562

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"Between 1751 and 1784, the Qianlong emperor embarked upon six southern tours, traveling from Beijing to Jiangnan and back. These tours were exercises in political theater that took the Manchu emperor through one of the Qing empire’s most prosperous regions. This study elucidates the tensions and the constant negotiations characterizing the relationship between the imperial center and Jiangnan, which straddled the two key provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Politically, economically, and culturally, Jiangnan was the undisputed center of the Han Chinese world; it also remained a bastion of Ming loyalism and anti-Manchu sentiment. How did the Qing court constitute its authority and legitimate its domination over this pivotal region? What were the precise terms and historical dynamics of Qing rule over China proper during the long eighteenth century? In the course of addressing such questions, this study also explores the political culture within and through which High Qing rule was constituted and contested by a range of actors, all of whom operated within socially and historically structured contexts. The author argues that the southern tours occupied a central place in the historical formation of Qing rule during a period of momentous change affecting all strata of the eighteenth-century polity."

Tangible Whispers, Neglected Encounters
Tangible Whispers, Neglected Encounters

Author: Marco Musillo

Publisher: Mimesis

Published: 2019-02-01T00:00:00+01:00

Total Pages: 117

ISBN-13: 8869772160

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The relationship between East and West remains a topic of burning timeliness, particularly in its political dimension. Yet, we can gain a complete understanding of the current tensions only if we consider them within a broader historical framework, spanning from art to diplomacy, from religion to ethnography. The present volume tackles precisely this complex task, offering its reader a rich mosaic of case studies and scholarly research, relating to the mutual approaches between the Euro-American ‘West’, and the Sino-Japanese ‘East’. In the first part of the book, art historian Marco Musillo uses the depictions of Tartars in fourteenth-century Italian frescoes as the starting point of a trajectory leading to eighteenth-century European literature on China. In the second part, the reader is introduced to two cases of diplomatic encounter, one in sixteenth-century Italy between Japanese subjects and local courts, and the other one between Qing China and twentieth-century United States, in the space of the universal exhibition in St. Louis. Finally, the last section proposes three interconnected art historical explorations: the screen design of Chinese origin in colonial Mexico, Medieval Christian tombstones in China, and early-modern Filipino sacred sculpture.