The Tang Dynasty (618-907) was a golden era in Chinese history. Rooted in its political strength and economic prosperity, the splendor of its culture makes its influence felt even today. Owing to its open-door policy, it assimilated the essence of many foreign cultures in order to enrich itself, thereby growing to become the most civilized country in the world at the time. The capital Chang'an was a global metropolis. This book is an overview of the heyday of the Tang Dynasty, including its literature, calligraphy, painting, dancing, arts and crafts, fashion and architecture, all of which have had a formative influence on Chinese culture.
In this fascinating and detailed profile, Benn paints a vivid picture of life in the Tang Dynasty (618-907), traditionally regarded as the golden age of China. 40 line illustrations.
Offering an unprecedented insight into one of the most glittering courts in history, this sumptuous book brings together some China's priceless national treasures, housed in Beijing's royal palace complex, the Forbidden City, and collected by Emperor Qianlong during his sixty-year reign from 1736 to 1795.
As China reclaims its position as a world power, Imperial Twilight looks back to tell the story of the country’s last age of ascendance and how it came to an end in the nineteenth-century Opium War. As one of the most potent turning points in the country’s modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today’s China seeks to put behind it. In this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new light on the early attempts by Western traders and missionaries to “open” China even as China’s imperial rulers were struggling to manage their country’s decline and Confucian scholars grappled with how to use foreign trade to China’s advantage. The book paints an enduring portrait of an immensely profitable—and mostly peaceful—meeting of civilizations that was destined to be shattered by one of the most shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history. Brimming with a fascinating cast of British, Chinese, and American characters, this riveting narrative of relations between China and the West has important implications for today’s uncertain and ever-changing political climate.
"What a fine and illuminating book! Shanghai Splendor is an important and captivating work of scholarship."—David Strand, author of Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s "This in an outstanding work. Although Shanghai has been among the most popular subjects for scholars in modern Chinese studies, one has yet to see a project as impressive as this. Yeh tells a most fascinating story."—David Der-wei Wang, author of The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in 20th Century China
The Caliph’s Splendor is a revelation: a history of a civilization we barely know that had a profound effect on our own culture. While the West declined following the collapse of the Roman Empire, a new Arab civilization arose to the east, reaching an early peak in Baghdad under the caliph Harun al-Rashid. Harun is the legendary caliph of The Thousand and One Nights, but his actual court was nearly as magnificent as the fictional one. In The Caliph’s Splendor, Benson Bobrick eloquently tells the little-known and remarkable story of Harun’s rise to power and his rivalries with the neighboring Byzantines and the new Frankish kingdom under the leadership of Charlemagne. When Harun came to power, Islam stretched from the Atlantic to India. The Islamic empire was the mightiest on earth and the largest ever seen. Although Islam spread largely through war, its cultural achievements were immense. Harun’s court at Baghdad outshone the independent Islamic emirate in Spain and all the courts of Europe, for that matter. In Baghdad, great works from Greece and Rome were preserved and studied, and new learning enhanced civilization. Over the following centuries Arab and Persian civilizations made a lasting impact on the West in astronomy, geometry, algebra (an Arabic word), medicine, and chemistry, among other fields of science. The alchemy (another Arabic word) of the Middle Ages originated with the Arabs. From engineering to jewelry to fashion to weaponry, Arab influences would shape life in the West, as they did in the fields of law, music, and literature. But for centuries Arabs and Byzantines contended fiercely on land and sea. Bobrick tells how Harun defeated attempts by the Byzantines to advance into Asia at his expense. He contemplated an alliance with the much weaker Charlemagne in order to contain the Byzantines, and in time Arabs and Byzantines reached an accommodation that permitted both to prosper. Harun’s caliphate would weaken from within as his two sons quarreled and formed factions; eventually Arabs would give way to Turks in the Islamic empire. Empires rise, weaken, and fall, but during its golden age, the caliphate of Baghdad made a permanent contribution to civilization, as Benson Bobrick so splendidly reminds us.
The reigning view of literary historians has been that the May Fourth movement of 1919 marks the division between the traditional and the modern in Chinese literature. This book argues that signs of reform and innovation can be discerned long before May Fourth, and that as China entered the arena of modern, international history in the late Qing, it was already developing its own complex matrix of incipient modernities. It demonstrates that late Qing fiction nurtured a creative, innovative poetics, one that was spurned by the reformers of the May Fourth generation in favor of Western-style realism. The author recognizes that a full account of modern Chinese fiction needs to ask why so many genres, styles, themes, and figures found in late imperial fiction were repressed by "modern" Chinese literary discourse. He focuses on four genres of late Qing fiction that have been either rudely dismissed in pejorative terms or simply ignored: depravity romances, court-case and chivalric cycles, grotesque exposés, and scientific fantasies. The author shows that in spite of the realist orthodoxy that has dominated Chinese literature since the May Fourth movement, these unwelcome genres have continually found their way back into mainstream discourse, their influence being increasingly evident in recent decades. This first comprehensive study of late Qing fiction discusses more than sixty works, at least half of which have rarely or never been dealt with by Western or Chinese scholars. Richly informed by contemporary literary theory, this book constitutes a polemical rethinking of the nature of Chinese literary and cultural modernity.
The Western Han dynasty (202 BCE–9 CE) was a foundational period for the artistic culture of ancient China, a fact particularly visible in the era’s funerary art. Iconic forms of Chinese art such as dazzling suits of jade; cavernous, rock-cut mountain tombs; fancifully ornate wall paintings; and armies of miniature terracotta warriors were prepared for the tombs of the elite during this period. Many of the finest objects of the Western Han have been excavated from the tombs of kings, who administered local provinces on behalf of the emperors. Allison R. Miller paints a new picture of elite art production by revealing the contributions of the kings to Western Han artistic culture. She demonstrates that the kings were not mere imitators of the imperial court but rather innovators, employing local materials and workshops and experimenting with new techniques to challenge the artistic hegemony of the imperial house. Tombs and funerary art, Miller contends, functioned as an important vehicle of political expression as kings strove to persuade the population and other elites of their legitimacy. Through case studies of five genres of royal art, Miller argues that the political structure of the early Western Han, with the emperor as one ruler among peers, benefited artistic production and innovation. Kingly Splendor brings together close readings of funerary art and architecture with nuanced analyses of political and institutional dynamics to provide an interdisciplinary revisionist history of the early Western Han.
