Empire of Great Brightness
Empire of Great Brightness

Author: Craig Clunas

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13:

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"This book is a history of a high point in Chinese culture, seen through the riches of its images and objects. Not a simple emperor-by-emperor history, Empire of Great Brightness instead introduces the reader to themes that provide points of entry into Ming China: to ideas of motion and rest, to the position occupied by writing and objects featuring writing, to ideas about pleasure, about violence and ageing. It challenges notions of Ming China as a culture closed off from the rest of the world by emphasizing the vibrant interactions between China and the rest of Asia at this period."--Jacket.

Colours and Contrast
Colours and Contrast

Author: Clarence Eng

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2014-11-14

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 9004285288

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In Colours and Contrast Clarence Eng covers the social history of architectural ceramics in China, their development both aesthetically (as ornament) and technically (as durable, protective components) in ancient Chinese architecture from palaces and temples to pagodas and screen walls.

Picturing the True Form
Picturing the True Form

Author: Shih-shan Susan Huang

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-03-17

Total Pages: 533

ISBN-13: 168417516X

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"Picturing the True Form investigates the long-neglected visual culture of Daoism, China’s primary indigenous religion, from the tenth through thirteenth centuries with references to both earlier and later times. In this richly illustrated book, Shih-shan Susan Huang provides a comprehensive mapping of Daoist images in various media, including Dunhuang manuscripts, funerary artifacts, and paintings, as well as other charts, illustrations, and talismans preserved in the fifteenth-century Daoist Canon. True form (zhenxing), the key concept behind Daoist visuality, is not static, but entails an active journey of seeing underlying and secret phenomena.This book’s structure mirrors the two-part Daoist journey from inner to outer. Part I focuses on inner images associated with meditation and visualization practices for self-cultivation and longevity. Part II investigates the visual and material dimensions of Daoist ritual. Interwoven through these discussions is the idea that the inner and outer mirror each other and the boundary demarcating the two is fluid. Huang also reveals three central modes of Daoist symbolism—aniconic, immaterial, and ephemeral—and shows how Daoist image-making goes beyond the traditional dichotomy of text and image to incorporate writings in image design. It is these particular features that distinguish Daoist visual culture from its Buddhist counterpart."

Living the Good Life
Living the Good Life

Author: Elif Akçetin

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-10-02

Total Pages: 591

ISBN-13: 9004353453

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Eighteenth-century consumers of the Qing and Ottoman empires had access to an increasingly diverse array of goods, from home furnishings to fashionable clothes and new foodstuffs. While this tendency was of shorter duration and intensity in the Ottoman world, some urbanites of the sultans’ realm did enjoy silks, coffee, and Chinese porcelain. By contrast, a vibrant consumer culture flourished in Qing China, where many consumers flaunted their fur coats and indulged in gourmet dining. Living the Good Life explores how goods furthered the expansion of social networks, alliance-building between rulers and regional elites, and the expression of elite, urban, and gender identities. The scholarship in the present volume highlights the recently emerging “material turn” in Qing and Ottoman historiographies and provides a framework for future research. Contributors: Arif Bilgin, Michael G. Chang, Edhem Eldem, Colette Establet, Antonia Finnane, Selim Karahasanoglu, Lai Hui-min, Amanda Phillips, Hedda Reindl-Kiel, Martina Siebert, Su Te-Cheng, Joanna Waley-Cohen, Wang Dagang, Wu Jen-shu, Yıldız Yılmaz, and Yun Yan.

Global Design History
Global Design History

Author: Glenn Adamson

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2011-03-15

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1136833080

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This book gathers together a number of leading design historians whose research points the way forward, aiming to address and promote changes to design history.

Women and the Literary World in Early Modern China, 1580-1700
Women and the Literary World in Early Modern China, 1580-1700

Author: Daria Berg

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-07-24

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 1136290214

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Exploring the works of key women writers within their cultural, artistic and socio-political contexts, this book considers changes in the perception of women in early modern China. The sixteenth century brought rapid developments in technology, commerce and the publishing industry that saw women emerging in new roles as both consumers and producers of culture. This book examines the place of women in the cultural elite and in society more generally, reconstructing examples of particular women’s personal experiences, and retracing the changing roles of women from the late Ming to the early Qing era (1580-1700). Providing rich detail of exceptionally fine, interesting and engaging literary works, this book opens fascinating new windows onto the lives, dreams, nightmares, anxieties and desires of the authors and the world out of which they emerged.

China
China

Author: John Keay

Publisher:

Published: 2011-12-06

Total Pages: 634

ISBN-13: 0465025188

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An authoritative history of five millennia of Chinese history

EurAsian Matters
EurAsian Matters

Author: Anna Grasskamp

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-05-03

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 3319756419

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The volume examines the mutually constitutive relationship between the materiality of objects and their aesthetic meanings. Its approach connects material culture with art history, curation, technologies and practices of making. A central dimension of the case studies collected here is the mobility of objects between Europe and China and the transformations that unfold as a result of their transcultural lives. Many of the objects studied here are relatively unknown or understudied. The stories they recount suggest new ways of thinking about space, cultural geographies and the complex and often contradictory association of power and culture. These studies of transcultural objects can suggest pathways for museum experts by uncovering the multi-layered identities and temporalities of objects that can no longer be labelled as located in single regions. It is also addressed to students of art history, of European and Chinese studies and scholars of consumer culture. « This eagerly awaited volume offers deep and extensive insights into the fast-growing field of material culture studies. Its fresh approach to Eurasian objects and materialities will serve as useful reading for all scholars interested in transcultural and global studies. A very helpful introductory essay. » Sabine du Crest, University of Bordeaux Montaigne, Former Fellow, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.

Empire's Crossroads
Empire's Crossroads

Author: Carrie Gibson

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Published: 2014-06-19

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 0230766188

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In Empire's Crossroads, Carrie Gibson offers readers a vivid, authoritative and action-packed history of the Caribbean. For Gibson, everything was created in the West Indies: the Europe of today, its financial foundations built with sugar money: the factories and mills built as a result of the work of slaves thousands of miles away; the idea of true equality as espoused in Saint Domingue in the 1790s; the slow progress to independence; and even globalization and migration, with the ships passing to and fro taking people and goods in all possible directions, hundreds of years before the term 'globalization' was coined. From Cuba to Haiti, from Dominica to Martinique, from Jamaica to Trinidad, the story of the Caribbean is not simply the story of slaves and masters - but of fortune-seekers and pirates, scientists and servants, travellers and tourists. It is not only a story of imperial expansion - European and American - but of global connections, and also of life as it is lived in the islands, both in the past and today.