Drawing on interviews with baijiu aficionados, distillers and key players in the alcoholic beverage industry, Sandhaus introduces the history and development of alcohol in China – the birthplace of grain-based alcohol. Distillation and production processes, the landscape of the industry today, and a page-by-page guide to the major varieties, distilleries and brands all feature in Baijiu: The Essential Guide to Chinese Spirits.
This is the first Chinese translation of "The Spirits' Book," the foundational work of Spiritism, originally published by Allan Kardec in 1857, in Paris (original title "Le Livre des Esprits"). Spiritism includes over 15 million adherents worldwide, ahead of more historically traditional religions such as Judaism and Jainism. Anyone interested in knowing about Spiritism should start by reading this book.
Offering a Taoist map of the human psyche, the "Five Spirits" provide a mythical view of the nervous system and form the basis of Chinese medical psychology. An understanding of these Five Spirits is the key that opens the doorway to the mysteries of Taoist psycho-spiritual alchemy.
The Spirits are Drunk presents Chinese religion as a complex, singular construct that is the basis of Chinese culture and civilization from its inception to the present. It focuses on the development and role of ecstatic religious experience and on the importance of the feminine in religious perceptions. Topics include the underlying structure of Chinese religion through the analysis of ritual; interpretations of the ritual decor of protohistoric sacrificial vessels in relation to ecstatic experience; the comparative study of myths and symbols; the development and interrelationships of shamanism, mediumism, and the mystic experience; the role of ecstatic religious experience in the arts and aesthetics; the importance of female deities; female roles in ritual; and the understanding of Christianity and Christian scriptures in China.
The acclaimed volumes of Princeton Readings in Religions present the remarkable range of all that is encompassed in the practice of religions, across the centuries and across the world. Religions of Asia in Practice: An Anthology brings together into a single volume the most important and fascinating selections from the volumes on Buddhism, India, China, Tibet, and Japan to give an overview of how religions have been lived by both ordinary and extraordinary people throughout the continent of Asia. These materials--many of which had never before been translated into any Western language--include ritual manuals, hagiographical and autobiographical writings, popular commentaries, instructions to children, poetry, and folktales. Each is preceded by a substantial introduction in which the translator discusses the text's history and influence and guides the reader through points of potential difficulty and particular interest. The volume includes, in addition, clear and compelling introductions to each of the major traditions. Religions of Asia in Practice: An Anthology offers a fascinating look at the spectrum of religious practices in Asia over almost three millennia. As such, it is ideally suited for use as a textbook in courses on world or Eastern religions as well as for the general reader.
In the midst of the Cultural Revolution a Rebel Red Guard anonymously circulated an essay condemning the Chinese Party elite as a decadent, exploitative 'new red capitalist class'. The subversive yet truthful nature of the message stung the top Communist leadership in Beijing. Incredibly, the writer, Yang Xiguang, was only nineteen years old, a star high school pupil and the son of high-ranking Hunan officials. Denounced as a 'counterrevolutionary' by Chairman Mao himself, Yang was hunted down, arrested in 1968, and sentenced to ten years in prison. Captive Spirits is his remarkable story of life in the Chinese gulag during one of the most tumultuous periods of modern Chinese history.
Resisting Spirits is a reconsideration of the significance and periodization of literary production in the high socialist era, roughly 1953 through 1966, specifically focused on Mao-era culture workers’ experiments with ghosts and ghost plays. Maggie Greene combines rare manuscript materials—such as theatre troupes’ annotated practice scripts—with archival documents, memoirs, newspapers, and films to track key debates over the direction of socialist aesthetics. Through arguments over the role of ghosts in literature, Greene illuminates the ways in which culture workers were able to make space for aesthetic innovation and contestation both despite and because of the constantly shifting political demands of the Mao era. Ghosts were caught up in the broader discourse of superstition, modernization, and China’s social and cultural future. Yet, as Greene demonstrates, the ramifications of those concerns as manifested in the actual craft of writing and performing plays led to further debates in the realm of literature itself: If we remove the ghost from a ghost play, does it remain a ghost play? Does it lose its artistic value, its didactic value, or both? At the heart of Greene’s intervention is “just reading”: the book regards literature first as literature, rather than searching immediately for its political subtext, and the voices of dramatists themselves finally upstage those of Mao’s inner circle. Ironically, this surface reading reveals layers of history that scholars of the Mao era have often ignored, including the ways in which social relations and artistic commitments continued to inform the world of art. Resisting Spirits thus illuminates the origins of more famous literary inquisitions, showing how the arguments surrounding ghost plays and the fates of their authors place the origins of the Cultural Revolution several years earlier, with a radical new shift in the discourse of theatre.
Rooted in Spirit explains the influence of the emotions on health according to ancient Chinese thought, examining the interrelationship of emotion and spirit and showing how our health and well-being depend upon the harmonious dwelling of the "spirits" (shen) in the heart. At the deepest level the practice of Chinese medicine involves the proper communication between practitioner and shen. Rooted in Spirit is a translation of Chapter Eight of the Lingshu portion of the Huangdi Neijing or The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine, the Chinese text on which all the Chinese healing arts are founded. Despite the great importance of this text in providing the spiritual and metaphysical context of Oriental medicine, it has been excluded from translations of the medical classics which reflect a materialistic bias. Chapter Eight is presented here together with a commentary by contemporary French sinologists, Elisabeth Rochat de la Vallee and Claude Larre, S.J.
