Ruan Yuan, 1764-1849

Ruan Yuan, 1764-1849
Author: Betty Peh-T'I Wei
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2006-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789622097858

This book explores the life and work of Ruan Yuan (1764–1849), a scholar-official of renown in mid-Qing China prior to the Opium War, before traditional institutions and values became altered by incursions from the West. His distinction as an official, scholar, and patron of learning has been recognized by both his contemporaries and modern scholars. He was also exulted as an honest official and an exemplary man of the 'Confucian persuasion'. His name is mentioned in almost all the works on Qing history or Chinese classics because of the wide range of his research and publications. A number of these publications are still being reprinted today. This is the first full-length biography of Ruan Yuan in English, and the only one focusing on all aspects of the man's life and work in the context of his time. It follows Ruan Yuan from his childhood in Yangzhou, expansion of his intellectual horizons and political network in Beijing, his long service in the provinces handling some of the most thorny issues of the day in security and control, to the glory as a senior statesman in the capital, and retirement in Yangzhou.

Ruan Yuan, 1764-1849

Ruan Yuan, 1764-1849
Author: Betty Peh-T'I Wei
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2006-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789622097858

This book explores the life and work of Ruan Yuan (1764–1849), a scholar-official of renown in mid-Qing China prior to the Opium War, before traditional institutions and values became altered by incursions from the West. His distinction as an official, scholar, and patron of learning has been recognized by both his contemporaries and modern scholars. He was also exulted as an honest official and an exemplary man of the 'Confucian persuasion'. His name is mentioned in almost all the works on Qing history or Chinese classics because of the wide range of his research and publications. A number of these publications are still being reprinted today. This is the first full-length biography of Ruan Yuan in English, and the only one focusing on all aspects of the man's life and work in the context of his time. It follows Ruan Yuan from his childhood in Yangzhou, expansion of his intellectual horizons and political network in Beijing, his long service in the provinces handling some of the most thorny issues of the day in security and control, to the glory as a senior statesman in the capital, and retirement in Yangzhou.

Encyclopedia of Chinese History

Encyclopedia of Chinese History
Author: Michael Dillon
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 872
Release: 2016-12-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1317817168

China has become accessible to the west in the last twenty years in a way that was not possible in the previous thirty. The number of westerners travelling to China to study, for business or for tourism has increased dramatically and there has been a corresponding increase in interest in Chinese culture, society and economy and increasing coverage of contemporary China in the media. Our understanding of China’s history has also been evolving. The study of history in the People’s Republic of China during the Mao Zedong period was strictly regulated and primary sources were rarely available to westerners or even to most Chinese historians. Now that the Chinese archives are open to researchers, there is a growing body of academic expertise on history in China that is open to western analysis and historical methods. This has in many ways changed the way that Chinese history, particularly the modern period, is viewed. The Encyclopedia of Chinese History covers the entire span of Chinese history from the period known primarily through archaeology to the present day. Treating Chinese history in the broadest sense, the Encyclopedia includes coverage of the frontier regions of Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet that have played such an important role in the history of China Proper and will also include material on Taiwan, and on the Chinese diaspora. In A-Z format with entries written by experts in the field of Chinese Studies, the Encyclopedia will be an invaluable resource for students of Chinese history, politics and culture.

A Dictionary of Chinese Literature

A Dictionary of Chinese Literature
Author: Taiping Chang Knechtges
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2017-09-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192513931

A Dictionary of Chinese Literature provides more than 250 entries on the lengthy and remarkable literary tradition of China, from its earliest literary genres such as the 6th century gongti wenxue (palace-style literature), to contemporary forms, such as wanglu wenxue (internet literature). Covering notable writers, works, terms, trends, schools, movements, styles, and literary collections, as well as including a useful list of further reading at the end of most entries, this dictionary is a key reference point for students of Asian literature and languages, and those studying world literature in general.

Zuozhuan and Early Chinese Historiography

Zuozhuan and Early Chinese Historiography
Author: Yuri Pines
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2023-10-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004685367

Zuozhuan (Zuo Tradition) is the foundational text of Chinese historiography and the largest text from preimperial China. For two millennia, its immense complexity has given rise to countless controversies, with scholars debating its nature, time of composition, and historical reliability. In the present volume—the first of its kind in any Western language—leading scholars of ancient China, Greece, and Rome approach Zuozhuan from multi-faceted perspectives to examine in detail Zuozhuan’s sources, narrative patterns, and meta-narrative devices; analyze the text in dialogue with other ancient Chinese works; and open it to the comparative study with ancient Greek and Roman historiography. Contributors are: Chen Minzhen, Stephen Durrant, Joachim Gentz, Martin Kern, Wai-yee Li, Nino Luraghi, Ellen O’Gorman, Yuri Pines, David Schaberg, and Kai Vogelsang.

The Inner Quarters and Beyond

The Inner Quarters and Beyond
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2010-07-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004190260

Only recently has the enormous literary output of women writers of the Ming and Qing periods (1368-1911) been rediscovered. Through these valuable texts, we apprehend in ways not possible earlier the complexity of women’s experiences in the inner quarters and their varied responses to challenges facing state and society. Writing in many genres, women engaged with topics as varied as war, travel, illness, love, friendship, female heroism, and religion. Drawing on a library of newly digitized resources, this volume's eleven chapters describe, analyze, and theorize these materials. They question previous assumptions about women’s lives and abilities, open up new critical space in Chinese literary history and offer new perspectives on China’s culture and society. “This volume rewrites the history of Chinese women’s literature by taking a truly inter-disciplinary (instead of merely multi-disciplinary) approach. In so doing, it ends up illuminating the centrality of writing women to the social, political, and intellectual lives of the Chinese empire from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.” Prof. Dorothy Ko, Barnard College, Columbia University, author of Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (California, 2005).

The Poet Zheng Zhen (1806-1864) and the Rise of Chinese Modernity

The Poet Zheng Zhen (1806-1864) and the Rise of Chinese Modernity
Author: Jerry D. Schmidt
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 750
Release: 2013-06-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004252290

In The Poet Zheng Zhen (1806-1864) and the Rise of Chinese Modernity, J. D. Schmidt provides the first detailed study in a Western language of one of China's greatest poets and explores the nineteenth-century background to Chinese modernity, challenging the widely held view that this is largely of Western origin. The volume contains a study of Zheng's life and times, an examination of his thought and literary theory, and four chapters studying his highly original contributions to poetry on the human realm, nature verse, narrative poetry, and the poetry of ideas, including his writings on science and technology. Over a hundred pages of translations of his verse conclude the work.

Theoretical Knowledge in the Mohist Canon

Theoretical Knowledge in the Mohist Canon
Author: Matthias Schemmel
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2023-01-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3031087976

This open access book presents a new translation, interpretation and analysis of selected passages from the so-called Mohist Canon, a Chinese text from ca. 300 BCE, and discusses the role of the text in the world history of science, arguing that it represents an early emergence of theoretical, systematized knowledge that is independent from parallel developments in ancient Greece. It is aimed at historians of science, of knowledge and of philosophy, and generally at readers interested in these topics from an intercultural perspective and particularly with respect to China.

Ancient Chinese Academy, Confucianism, and Society II

Ancient Chinese Academy, Confucianism, and Society II
Author: Xiao Yongming
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2022-11-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000772217

As the second volume of a two-volume set that studies the ancient Chinese academy from a socio-cultural perspective, this title investigates the multifaceted roles and political and cultural significance of the academy. Inaugurated in the Tang dynasty and eventually abolished in the late Qing dynasty, the academy, as a unique cultural and educational organization in the Chinese history, exerted extensive and profound influence on the ancient Chinese culture, politics, and social life. This title first discusses the state control of the academy and how it functions in social governance, then examines the sacrificial ritual of the academy and its influence on education, enculturation, Confucian orthodoxy, and intellectual ethos, and finally elaborates on the academy's role in enriching the regional cultures in terms of local cultural undertakings and talent cultivation. The title will be a useful reference for scholars, students, and general readers interested in cultural history, intellectual history, and educational history of ancient China and especially the Chinese academy culture.

Interfamily Tanci Writing in Nineteenth-Century China

Interfamily Tanci Writing in Nineteenth-Century China
Author: Yu Zhang
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2017-12-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498557864

Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this is the first monograph to frame three once widely-read tanci fiction (a type of lyrical narrative) from nineteenth-century China, Meng ying yuan (1843), Yu xuan cao (1894), and Jing zhong zhuan (1895), as interrelated texts composed by three generation of members from one extended gentry family in South China. Based on the framework of family bonds, this book uses the three tanci works, authored by a mother, her daughter, and a nephew, to examine the history of how the changing aesthetics of tanci developed over China’s turbulent nineteenth century. It also demonstrates how the three writers used the genre of tanci to blur the boundaries of orthodox Confucian norms, in order to depict the evolving nature of gendered power relations at the dawn of China’s modernity.