A fun way to learn about China in a visual, informative comic-style history. Who founded China? Are Chinese people religious? What is Chinese culture and how has it changed over time? The accessible and fun Understanding China Through Comics series answers those questions and more. For all ages, Foundations of Chinese Civilization covers China's early history in comic form, introducing philosophies like Confucianism and Daoism, the story of the Silk Road, famous emperors like Han Wudi, and the process of China's unification. Includes a handy timeline. This is volume one of the Understanding China Through Comics series. Jing Liu is a Beijing native now living in Davis, California. A successful designer and entrepreneur who helped brands tell their stories, Jing currently uses his artistry to tell the story of China.
This book discusses examples of how the U.S. Founding Fathers were influenced and inspired by Chinese agriculture, architecture, and philosophy. China, then one of the most stable and powerful civilizations in the world, offered unique perspectives on various aspects of society which were distinct from the Founding Fathers’ European heritage. China provided an alternative set of social and political frameworks which supported the Founding Fathers’ efforts to craft a unique heritage for their young nation. These Founders sought to establish a political identity that was distinct from European aristocratic traditions.
The second and first centuries B.C. were a critical period in Chinese history—they saw the birth and development of the new Chinese empire and its earliest expansion and acquisition of frontier territories. But for almost two thousand years, because of gaps in the available records, this essential chapter in the history was missing. Fortunately, with the discovery during the last century of about sixty thousand Han-period documents in Central Asia and western China preserved on strips of wood and bamboo, scholars have been able, for the first time, to put together many of the missing pieces. In this first volume of his monumental history, Chun-shu Chang uses these newfound documents to analyze the ways in which political, institutional, social, economic, military, religious, and thought systems developed and changed in the critical period from early China to the Han empire (ca. 1600 B.C. – A.D. 220). In addition to exploring the formation and growth of the Chinese empire and its impact on early nation-building and later territorial expansion, Chang also provides insights into the life and character of critical historical figures such as the First Emperor (221– 210 B.C.) of the Ch’in and Wu-ti (141– 87 B.C.) of the Han, who were the principal agents in redefining China and its relationships with other parts of Asia. As never before, Chang’s study enables an understanding of the origins and development of the concepts of state, nation, nationalism, imperialism, ethnicity, and Chineseness in ancient and early Imperial China, offering the first systematic reconstruction of the history of Chinese acquisition and colonization. Chun-shu Changis Professor of History at the University of Michigan and is the author, with Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang, ofCrisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-Century ChinaandRedefining History: Ghosts, Spirits, and Human Society in P’u Sung-ling’s World, 1640–1715. “An extraordinary survey of the political and administrative history of early imperial China, which makes available a body of evidence and scholarship otherwise inaccessible to English-readers. The underpinning of research is truly stupendous.” —Ray Van Dam, Professor, Department of History, University of Michigan “Powerfully argues from literary and archaeological records that empire, modeled on Han paradigms, has largely defined Chinese civilization ever since.” —Joanna Waley-Cohen, Professor, Department of History, New York University
The center of this prodigious work of scholarship is a fresh examination of the range of Chinese culture thought during the formative period of Chinese culture. Benjamin Schwartz looks at the surviving texts of this period with a particular focus on the range of diversity to be found in them. While emphasizing the problematic and complex nature of this thought he also considers views which stress the unity of Chinese culture. Attention is accorded to pre-Confucian texts, to the evolution of early Confucianism, to Mo-Tzu, to the Taoists the legalists, the Ying-Yang school, the five classics as well as to intellectual issues which cut across the conventional classification of schools. The main focus is on the high cultural texts, but Mr. Schwartz also explores the question of the relationship of these texts to the vast realm of popular culture.
Is it possible that the familiar and beloved figure of Confucius was invented by Jesuit priests? Based on specific documentary evidence, historian Lionel Jensen reveals how 16th- and 17th-century Western missionaries used translations of the ancient RU tradition to invent the presumably historical figure who has been globally celebrated as philosopher, prophet, statesman, wise man, and saint. 13 illustrations.
The author of landmark histories such as Genghis Khan, Attila, and Xanadu invites us to discover a fertile period in Asian history that prefigured so much of the world that followed. The people of the first nomadic empire left no written records, but from 200 bc they dominated the heart of Asia for four centuries, and changed the world in the process. The Mongols, today’s descendants of Genghis Khan, see these people as ancestors. Their rise cemented Chinese identity and inspired the first Great Wall. Their descendants helped destroy the Roman Empire under the leadership of Attila the Hun. We don’t know what language they spoke, but they became known as Xiongnu, or Hunnu, a term passed down the centuries and surviving today as “Hun,” and Man uncovers new evidence that will transform our understanding of the profound mark they left on half the globe, from Europe to Central Asia and deep into China. Based on meticulous research and new archaeological evidence, Empire of Horses traces this civilization’s epic story and shows how this nomadic cultures of the steppes gave birth to an empire with the wealth and power to threaten the order of the ancient world.
The author examines China's political, economic and social structures which have resulted in a culture that has stifled creative thinking - He argues that China has been both held together and held back by its extreme deference to history - Boxer movement - Cultural Revolution - Great Leap Forward.
This deeply informed and beautifully written book provides a comprehensive and comprehensible history of China from prehistory to the present. Focusing on the interaction of humans and their environment, Robert B. Marks traces changes in the physical and cultural world that is home to a quarter of humankind. Through both word and image, this work illuminates the chaos and paradox inherent in China's environmental narrative, demonstrating how historically sustainable practices can, in fact, be profoundly ecologically unsound. The author also reevaluates China's traditional "he.
Winner of the 2009 Society for American Archaeology Book Award Chinese Society in the Age of Confucius is based on the most up-to-date archaeological discoveries. It introduces new data, as well as new ways to think about them - modes of analysis that, while familiar to archaeological practitioners in the West and in Japan, are herein applied to evidence from the Chinese Bronze Age for the first time. The treatment of social stratification, clan and lineage organisation, as well as gender and ethnic differences will be of interest to those involved in the general or comparative analysis of grand themes in the Social Sciences.
