The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China

The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China

Author: Kai-wing Chow

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1996-12-01

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 0804765782

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This pathbreaking work argues that the major intellectual trend in China from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth century was Confucian ritualism, as expressed in ethics, classical learning, and discourse on lineage. Reviews "Chow has produced a work of superb scholarship, fluently written and beautifully researched. . . . One of the landmarks of the current reconstruction of the social philosophy of the Qing dynasty. . . . Chow's book is indispensable. It has illuminating analyses of many mainstream writers, institutions, and social categories in eighteenth-century China which have never previously been examined." —Canadian Journal of History "Chow's monograph moves ritual to center stage in late imperial social and intellectual history, and the author makes a powerful case for doing so. . . . Because the author understands the intellectual history of late Ming and Qing as the history of a movement, or successive movements, of fundamental social reform, he has also made an important contribution to social and political history as these were related to intellectual history." —Journal of Chinese Religion "Chow's book is an excellent contribution to recent scholarship on the intellectual history of the Confucian tradition and provides a balance for other studies that have emphasized ideas to the exclusion of symbols." —The Historian


Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China

Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China

Author: Cynthia J. Brokaw

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2005-03-07

Total Pages: 559

ISBN-13: 0520927796

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Despite the importance of books and the written word in Chinese society, the history of the book in China is a topic that has been little explored. This pioneering volume of essays, written by historians, art historians, and literary scholars, introduces the major issues in the social and cultural history of the book in late imperial China. Informed by many insights from the rich literature on the history of the Western book, these essays investigate the relationship between the manuscript and print culture; the emergence of urban and rural publishing centers; the expanding audience for books; the development of niche markets and specialized publishing of fiction, drama, non-Han texts, and genealogies; and more.


Practicing Kinship

Practicing Kinship

Author: Michael Szonyi

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780804742610

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Presenting a new approach to the history of Chinese kinship, this book attempts to bridge the gap between anthropological and historical scholarship on the Chinese lineage. It explores the historical development of kinship in the villages of the Fuzhou region of southeastern Fujian province.


Mourning in Late Imperial China

Mourning in Late Imperial China

Author: Norman Kutcher

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2006-11-02

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780521030182

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To win the approval of China's native elites, Qing China's new Manchu leaders developed an ambitious plan to return Confucianism to civil society by observing laborious and time-consuming mourning rituals, the touchstones of a well-ordered Confucian society. The first to do so in any language, Norman Kutcher's study of mourning looks beneath the rhetoric to demonstrate how the state--unwilling to make the sacrifices that a genuine commitment to proper mourning demanded--quietly but forcefully undermined, not reinvigorated, the Confucian mourning system.


Ritual Opera and Mercantile Lineage

Ritual Opera and Mercantile Lineage

Author: Qitao Guo

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 9780804750325

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Focusing on the Confucian transformation of Mulian opera, and especially on the interplay between the "civilizing" effect of ritual performance and the rise of gentrified mercantile lineages in sixteenth-century Huizhou prefecture, this book develops a radically novel interpretation of both Chinese popular culture and the Confucian tradition in late imperial China.


Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China

Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China

Author: Kai-wing Chow

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0804733686

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This path-breaking book argues that printing—both with woodblocks and with movable type—exerted a profound influence on Chinese society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.


True to Her Word

True to Her Word

Author: Weijing Lu

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 9780804758086

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This book is a comprehensive study of faithful maidenhood in late imperial China from the vantage points of state policy, local history, scholarly debate, and the faithful maiden’s own subjective point of view.


Confucianism and Sacred Space

Confucianism and Sacred Space

Author: Chin-shing Huang

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2020-12-01

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 0231552890

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Temples dedicated to Confucius are found throughout China and across East Asia, dating back over two thousand years. These sacred and magnificent sanctuaries hold deep cultural and political significance. This book brings together studies from Chin-shing Huang’s decades-long research into Confucius temples that individually and collectively consider Confucianism as religion. Huang uses the Confucius temple to explore Confucianism both as one of China’s “three religions” (with Buddhism and Daoism) and as a cultural phenomenon, from the early imperial era through the present day. He argues for viewing Confucius temples as the holy ground of Confucianism, symbolic sites of sacred space that represent a point of convergence between political and cultural power. Their complex histories shed light on the religious nature and character of Confucianism and its status as official religion in imperial China. Huang examines topics such as the political and intellectual elements of Confucian enshrinement, how Confucius temples were brought into the imperial ritual system from the Tang dynasty onward, and why modern Chinese largely do not think of Confucianism as a religion. A nuanced analysis of the question of Confucianism as religion, Confucianism and Sacred Space offers keen insights into Confucius temples and their significance in the intertwined intellectual, political, social, and religious histories of imperial China.


Confucianism

Confucianism

Author: Daniel K. Gardner

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 153

ISBN-13: 0195398912

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This volume shows the influence of the Sage's teachings over the course of Chinese history--on state ideology, the civil service examination system, imperial government, the family, and social relations--and the fate of Confucianism in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as China developed alongside a modernizing West and Japan. Some Chinese intellectuals attempted to reform the Confucian tradition to address new needs; others argued for jettisoning it altogether in favor of Western ideas and technology; still others condemned it angrily, arguing that Confucius and his legacy were responsible for China's feudal, ''backward'' conditions in the twentieth century and launching campaigns to eradicate its influences. Yet Chinese continue to turn to the teachings of Confucianism for guidance in their daily lives.


Genealogy of the Way

Genealogy of the Way

Author: Thomas A. Wilson

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 9780804724258

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Beginning in the late Southern Sung one sect of Confucianism gradually came to dominate literati culture and, by the Ming dynasty, was canonized as state orthodoxy. This book is a historical and textual critique of the construction of an ideologically exclusionary conception of the Confucian tradition, and how claims to possession of the truth—the Tao—came to serve power.