Author:
Ao Wang 王敖
Publication Date:
August 2018
Publisher:
Cambria Press
Abstract:
This book explores a new and innovative topic—the relationship between geographical advancements in the Mid-Tang period (790s to 820s) and spatial imaginaries in contemporaneous literature. Historically and politically, the Mid-Tang period is generally considered to be a period of imperial reconstruction following the chaos of the An Lushan Rebellion (755–763), a rebellion that had a profound impact not only on the Tang empire but also on all of Chinese history. On the one hand, this era witnessed a heightened geographical awareness and a rapid development and accumulation of geographical knowledge, as was manifested in the governmental production of local map-guides and the invention of some monumental world maps. On the other hand, Mid-Tang literature represents one of the peaks of traditional Chinese literature and is known for its diversity of genres and innovative and imaginative engagement with space.
For the first time in Tang scholarship, this study identifies the epistemological and aesthetic interplay between geography and literature in medieval China and investigates how this thus-far neglected interplay shaped the Mid-Tang literary imagination. This interdisciplinary investigation uncovers a rich cultural history of human exploration of the world on both fronts and provides a fresh reading of some of the most famous works of Tang literature, for example Li He’s poetry and Liu Zongyuan’s landscape essays. This study reveals some unique phenomena in genre development and individual creation in Mid-Tang literature and deepens our understanding of the inner workings and internal drive of traditional Chinese literature in general.
This book expands and deepens the exploration of the interactions between literature and geography. Literary geography has been an active interdisciplinary field ever since the 1970s. In the early years as the field was taking shape, it was widely criticized for its instrumentalization of literary texts as unproblematic sources for empirical geographical study. In recent years, however, literary scholars have become increasingly interested in treating literary texts as another form of geography, or spatial organization, as many key literary elements, such as setting and milieu in fiction and imagery arrangement in poetry, involve spatial understanding on a fundamental level.
This study takes two important approaches regarding the ongoing debates in the field of literary geography. Inasmuch as traditional Chinese intellectual culture prioritized broad learning over specialization, disciplinary boundaries were unclear and literati were often multitalented. Accordingly, in the cases examined in this book, these literary masters were also cartographers, geographical writers, or at least experienced readers of geographical works. Therefore, the study’s approach does not treat either literature or geography as instrumental to the other, but rather examines how these two interrelated fields formed a shared intellectual horizon among the literati and found entrance to each other to create new knowledge, perspectives, and metaphors. This study also does not regard literature as a metaphorical geography in a generalized sense, but is specifically focused on how the geographic proficiency of literary authors informed their literature. Together, these two approaches suggest new possibilities of interdisciplinary exchange and offer a new perspective on the results of such exchanges as embodied in literary creation.
This book will be a welcome resource for scholars and students in Chinese literature, historical geography, cultural history, and art history.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Chapter 1. Geographical Advancements in the Mid-Tang
Chapter 2. The Big Picture: Poetic Visions and the Cartographic Eye
Chapter 3. The Shifting Shapes of the Local Sphere: Map-Guides and
Literary Writing
Chapter 4. Into the Deep South: The Aesthetics of New Landmark Creation
Chapter 5. Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen: The Wonder of Interactive Geography
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Editors:
Amelung, Iwo / Kurtz, Joachim
Publication Date:
2018
Publisher:
München Iudicium
Abtract:
Over more than 40 years, the sinologist Michael Lackner has studied a broad range of issues in China’s past and present. On the occasion of his 65th birthday, this volume brings together essays from friends, collaborators, colleagues, and students dedicated to the three fields of research in which he has made his most lasting contributions: philology, the histories of science and thought, and the study of prognostication. Michael Lackner’s work in all these areas is connected by an intense engagement with “signs”—texts and images but also objects, dreams, portents and omens—and the semiotic, epistemic and political contexts in which they become meaningful. The 25 contributions presented here highlight the fertility of such a transdisciplinary approach. Reading signs in material, textual, and visual sources dating from 2000 BCE to the present, scholars from four continents address themes as diverse as early Chinese ritual and cosmology; imperial and modern Chinese poetry, prose and drama; Chinese alchemy, astronomy and mathematics; the theory and practice of divination and prognosis; as well as exegetical traditions, political rhetoric, and problems of translation. Many articles examine entanglements between China and the West and offer comparative perspectives on developments in Europe and the Islamicate world.
Table of Contents:
List of Publications by Michael Lackner 朗宓榭
To a Reader of Signs: A Dedication
Iwo Amelung and Joachim Kurtz
I. Philology
The Earliest Chinese Bells in Light of New Archaeological Discoveries
Lothar von Falkenhausen
Reading Newly Discovered Texts: Approaches to the Guodian Text “Zhongxin zhi dao” 忠信之道
Michael Schimmelpfennig
The Language of Heaven
Rudolf G. Wagner
Sage: An Unreadable Sign
Chu Pingyi
Du Fu’s Long Gaze Back: Fate, History, Heroism, Authorship
Martin Kern
Sources for his Chinese Book
Christoph Harbsmeier
The Chinese Traditional Method of “Full or Vacant Characters” and the Grammar of Port-Royal
Uchida Keiichi
The Formation of Modern Written Chinese: Writing Categories and Polysyllabic Words
Shen Guowei
How to Modernize Hermeneutics: Readings of Rilke’s Late Poems
Christoph König
II. History
Laozi and Internal Alchemy
Fabrizio Pregadio
Drunken Talk: Political Discourse and Alcohol Consumption during the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127 CE)
Dagmar Schäfer
Nara Singde, Assimilation, Acculturation, and Identity in the Early Qing
Erling von Mende
The Delayed “Triumph” of Yan Ruoqu’s Evidential Studies during the Qianlong Era
Benjamin A. Elman
Scientific News or Prognostic Interpretation: Chinese Records of the 1874 Transit of Venus
Lü Lingfeng
Local Refractions of a Global Concept
Joachim Kurtz
The Role of Alchemy in Constructing the Chinese Scientific Tradition
Iwo Amelung
Being Modern without the West? On the Futility of Self-Assertion in Chinese Thought
Marc A. Matten
Numbers as Signs: Conceptual Entanglements between Mathematics, Divination, and Language in the Modern Era
Andrea Bréard
III. Prognostication
Mis-reading the Signs, or: Theorizing Divination— Chinese and Greek
Lisa A. Raphals
Prognostication and Christianity in the Early Middle Ages
Klaus Herbers
Anxiety and Fear: Hexagrams “Ge” (49) and “Ding” (50) in the Zhouyi daquan
Tze-ki Hon
„An jenem Tag“. Über Prognose im Koran
Georges Tamer
Divination and Globalization: Some Comparative Perspectives on Geomancy in Premodern East Asia
Richard J. Smith
A Future Written in the Past: Prognostication in Diary Novels of Republican China
Carsten Storm
Fate, Freedom, and Will in European and Chinese Discourses on Chinese Tragedies
Natascha Gentz
Editor:
工藤元男 (Motoo Kudō)
Publisher:
汲古書院
Publication Date:
May 2018
Table of Contents:
序文
凡例
「秦律十八種」訳注
田律／厩苑律／倉律／金布律／関市律／工律／工人程／
均工律／徭律／司空律／軍爵律／置吏律／效律／
伝食律／行書律／内史雑／尉雑／属邦律
「效律」訳注
「秦律雑抄」訳注
Author:
Mu-chou Poo
Publication Date:
August 2018
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Abstract:
In this volume, Mu-chou Poo offers a new overview of daily life in ancient China. Synthesizing a range of textual and archaeological materials, he brings a thematic approach to the topic that enables a multi-faceted understanding of the ideological, economical, legal, social, and emotional aspects of life in ancient China. The volume focuses on the Han period and examines key topics such as government organization and elite ideology, urban and country life, practical technology, leisure and festivity, and death and burial customs. Written in clear and engaging prose, this volume serves as a useful introduction to the culture and society of ancient China. It also enables students to better understand the construction of history and to reflect critically on the nature of historical writing.
Table of Contents:
1. The stage
2. Government organization and elite ideology
3. Social structure and law
4. Country life
5. Cities and urban life
6. Production, consumption, and ideological constraints
7. Practical technology
8. Leisure and entertainment, games and festivals
9. Glimpses of emotional life
10. Death, burial, and the hope of a happy afterlife
Conclusion: continuation and transformation of life experience
Author:
Wicky W. K. Tse
Publisher:
Routledge
Publication Date:
July 2018
Abstract:
In the Later Han period the region covering the modern provinces of Gansu, southern Ningxia, eastern Qinghai, northern Sichuan, and western Shaanxi, was a porous frontier zone between the Chinese regimes and their Central Asian neighbours, not fully incorporated into the Chinese realm until the first century BCE. Not surprisingly the region had a large concentration of men of martial background, from which a regional culture characterized by warrior spirit and skills prevailed. This military elite was generally honoured by the imperial centre, but during the Later Han period the ascendancy of eastern-based scholar-officials and the consequent increased emphasis on civil values and de-militarization fundamentally transformed the attitude of the imperial state towards the northwestern frontiersmen, leaving them struggling to achieve high political and social status. From the ensuing tensions and resentment followed the capture of the imperial capital by a northwestern military force, the deposing of the emperor and the installation of a new one, which triggered the disintegration of the empire. Based on extensive original research, and combining cultural, military and political history, this book examines fully the forging of military regional identity in the northwest borderlands and the consequences of this for the early Chinese empires.
Table of Contents:
1 Introductory Orientations: The Later Han, Its Northwestern Frontier & Regional Identity
2 Opening New Territories & Partitioning the Space: Natural and Administrative Geographies of the Early Imperial Northwest
3 Being Peripheralized: The Northwesterners in the Later Han Empire
4 The Others Within: The Qiang Wars and the Abandonment of the Northwest
5 Epilogue: The Beginning of the End
Editors:
Huaiyu Chen 陳懷宇 and Xinjiang Rong 榮新江
Publication Date:
24 May 2018
Publisher:
Brill
Abstract:
Drawing upon numerous manuscripts from China and Central Asia, the articles presented in this volume by leading scholars in the field examine a broad range of topics on the multi-lingual, multi-religious, and multi-ethnic communities along the Silk Road in the medieval period, and cover such topics as the social history of Kucha, book history in Dunhuang, the spread of Manichaeism, the political history of Turkic and Khotanese Kingdoms, and the travelogue of the Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang. They demonstrate that Han Chinese, Khotanese, Sogdians, Tocharians, Tibetans, and Uyghurs have all contributed to constructing a sophisticated international network across Asia.
Table of Contents:
A Note from the Editors
A Chronological Bibliography of Professor Zhang Guangda
1 On the Word ṣau Found in the Kuchean Secular Documents
Ching Chao-jung 慶昭蓉
2 Dunhuang and Two Revolutions in the History of the Chinese Book
Jean-Pierre Drège
3 Two Fragments of Tocharian B laissez-passers Kept in the Berlin Collection
Ogihara Hirotoshi 荻原裕敏
4 Possible Adaptation of the Book of the Giants in the Manichaean Traité
Ma Xiaohe 馬小鶴
5 The Rouran Qaghanate and the Western Regions during the Second Half of the Fifth Century based on a Chinese Document Newly Found in Turfan
Rong Xinjiang
6 A Sogdian Fragment from Niya
Nicolas Sim-Williams and Bi Bo 畢波
7 On the Chinese Name for the Syr Darya in Xuanzang’s Account of Western Regions
Takata Tokio 高田時雄
8 A New Study on Mouyu Qaghan’s Conversion to Manichaeism
Wang Xiaofu 王小甫
9 Beyond Deciphering: An Overview of Tocharian Studies over the Past Thirty Years
Xu Wenkan 徐文堪
10 Historical Background of the Sevrey Inscription in Mongolia
Yoshida Yutaka 吉田豊
11 “The Annals of the Noble Land Khotan”: A New Translation of a Chapter of rGya bod yig tshang chen mo
Zhu Lishuang
12 Kaniṣka in the Old Turkic Tradition
Peter Zieme
