Sources of Han Décor: Foreign Influence on the Han Dynasty Chinese Iconography of Paradise (206 BC-AD 220)

Author:
Sophia-Karin Psarras

Publisher: 
Archaeopress Archaeology

Publication date:
February 29, 2020

Abstract:
Using archaeological data to examine the development of Han dynasty Chinese art (206 BC-AD 220), Sources of Han Décor focusses on three major iconographies (the animal master, the tree of life, and animal predation), together with a series of minor motifs (particularly the griffin and a number of vegetal forms). All of these are combined in what may be considered the most important iconographic creation of the Han: images of paradise. While influence from the Chinese Bronze Age (especially, c. the 14th-3rd centuries BC) on Han art is expected, a surprisingly profound debt to Greece, the Near East, and the steppe is evident not only in the art of the Han era, but in that of the preceding Eastern Zhou (c. 771-221 BC). Initial Eastern Zhou incorporation of this largely-Western influence appears concentrated in chronological parallel to the Orientalization of Greek art (c. the 7th century BC) and the eastern spread of Hellenism (c. the 4th century BC), followed by repeated introduction of foreign motifs during the Han, when these influences were fully integrated into Chinese art.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

I: Major Iconographies

Chapter 1 Eastern Zhou Context

Chapter 2 The Animal Master

Chapter 3 Developments Related to the Animal Master

Chapter 4 Tree of Life

Chapter 5 Animal Predation

II: Decorative Elements

Chapter 6 Fantastic Elements

Chapter 7 Plant Motifs

Conclusion

Metalworking in Bronze Age China: The Lost-Wax Process

Author:
Peng Peng 彭鵬

Publication date:
2019

Publisher:
Cambria Press

Abstract:
Metalworking in Bronze Age China is the first study that adopts a comprehensive, thorough, and interdisciplinary approach toward early Chinese lost-wax castings. It shows that the dominant belief that the lost-wax process as the optimal method for casting bronzes deserves more rigorous examination. In a broader sense, the book provides a study on the “norms,” which are seldom questioned. By examining the reasons why Chinese founders often chose not to use the lost-wax process they had clearly mastered, the book refutes the idea that lost-wax technology is the only “right way” to cast bronzes. This study demonstrates that a “norm” is in many ways an illusion that twists our comprehension of art, technology, civilization, and history.

Table of Contents:
Introduction
Chapter 1. What Is Lost-wax Casting?
Chapter 2. Metalworking in Bronze Age China
Chapter 3. Was Lost-wax Casting Used in Bronze Age China?
Chapter 4. Further Confirmed Lost-wax Castings I: The Xiasi Jin
Chapter 5. Further Confirmed Lost-wax Castings II: Certain “Diatrete” Vessels and Mirrors
Chapter 6. Further Confirmed Lost-wax Castings III: Objects with “Interpenetrating” Openwork Appendages
Chapter 7. Design as the Driving Force
Chapter 8. The Origin of the Lost-wax Technique in Bronze Age China
Chapter 9. Coda: Additional Issues and Comments

江南の発展：南宋まで （シリーズ中国の歴史2 ）

Author：
丸橋充拓 (MARUHASHI Mitsuhiro)

Publisher：
岩波書店

Publication date：
January 2020

Table of Contents:

いま、中国史をみつめなおすために――シリーズ中国の歴史のねらい（執筆者一同）

はじめに

第一章　「古典国制」の外縁――漢以前
　一　長江流域の諸文化
　二　「楚」の血脈
　三　「古典国制」と対峙する人びと

第二章　「古典国制」の継承――六朝から隋唐へ
　一　南からみる『三国志』
　二　江南の「中華王朝」
　三　六朝の貴族たち
　四　隋唐帝国と江南

第三章　江南経済の起動――唐から宋へ
　一　運河と海
　二　文臣官僚の時代
　三　花石綱

第四章　海上帝国への道――南宋
　一　金・モンゴルとの対峙
　二　江南の繁栄
　三　海上帝国の形成

第五章　「雅」と「俗」のあいだ
　一　俗――地域社会の姿
　二　雅――士大夫のネットワーク

おわりに――ふたたび、若者の学びのために
あとがき

Contacts between the Shang and the south c. 1300-1045 BC : resemblance and resistance

Author:
Celine Lai

Publisher:
Oxford: BAR Publishing

Publication date:
2019

Abstract:
This monograph presents the first thorough study of the bronzes from south-central China. The finds from the Yangtze areas have conventionally been thought to have been entirely inspired by Shang traditions and ritual practices in Henan. This monograph applies the perspective of materiality to argue otherwise. Through investigations of three main bronze types: ritual vessels, bells and weapons, the author suggests that the Yangtze societies were far more independent from the Shang traditions than most archaeologists have understood them to have been.

Table of Contents:
Introduction
Case Study I: Bronze Ritual Vessels
Case Study II: Bronze Nao 鐃 Bells
Case Study III: Bronze Weapons

Lu Jia's New Discourses: A Political Manifesto from the Early Han Dynasty

Translators: 
Paul Goldin and Elisa Levi Sabattini

Publisher:
Brill

Publication date:
January 2020

Abstract:
Lu Jia's New Discourses: A Political Manifesto from the Early Han Dynasty is a readable yet accurate translation by Paul R. Goldin and Elisa Levi Sabattini. Celebrated as “a man-of-service with a mouth [skilled] at persuasion”, Lu Jia (c. 228-140 BCE) became one of the leading figures of the early Han dynasty, serving as a statesman and diplomat from the very beginning of the Han empire. This book is a translation of Lu Jia’s New Discourses, which laid out the reasons for rise and fall of empires. Challenged by the new Emperor to produce a book explaining why a realm that was conquered on horseback cannot also be ruled on horseback, Lu Jia produced New Discourses, to great acclaim.

Table of Contents:
Historical and Intellectual Context
Lu Jia and the New Discourses
Xinyu and its Editions
Our Principles of Translation and Annotation
Translations into Western languages
New Discourses 新語
The Foundation of the Way 道基
Recounting [Past] Events 術事
Assisting in Government 輔政
Non-Action 無為
Resolving Delusion 辨惑
Attention to the Subtle 慎微
Aides of Quality 資質
Utmost Virtue 至德
Embracing [Consistent] Thoughts 懷慮
Acting on the [Right] Basis 本行
Perceptible Warnings 明誡
Thinking of One's Responsibilities 思務

[Dissertation] Mechanical Metaphors in Early Chinese Thought

Author:
Zhou, Boqun

School:
The University of Chicago

Defended:
2019

Abstract:
It is well known that Chinese philosophers in the Warring States period (475–221 BCE) were enamored with metaphors and analogies in their philosophical discussion. Imageries of plants, tools, and bodily skills abounded in debates over morality, politics, language, and human nature. While previous scholarship on ancient metaphors tends to focus on organic and spiritual ones such as plant and water, I argue that the Warring States period witnessed the emergence of a group of mechanical metaphors, and the metaphorical interest in machines is as ancient as it is cross-cultural. These metaphors started with the Mohist mechanics and the advent of the crossbow around the sixth to the fifth century BCE, gradually making their way into the standard vocabulary of morality and politics. They were all based on the lever (quan 權), a simple device widely used in technologies of weighing and weight-lifting. Lever machines, such as the balance, the well sweep, the crossbow trigger, and the trebuchet, provided metaphorical models for conceptualizing balance and imbalance in various kinds of human relationships. Whereas the function of weighing became a metaphor for decision-making in Confucian ethics, the function of weighing-lifting became a metaphor for strategic or positional advantage in military and political craft. The two functions correspond to two opposite kinds of rationality – value rationality that seeks to find moral balance in a dilemma and instrumental rationality that seeks to create strategic imbalance in power dynamics (that is, how the few could defeat or control the many). Due to the double function of the lever itself, the classical quan acquired the paradoxical meaning of “weighing” (as in quanheng 權衡) and “leverage” (as in quanshi 權勢), both of which survived well into modern Chinese but lost the mechanical association.

This dissertation is divide into five chapters. Chapter 1 defines an analytic framework by incorporating the conceptual metaphor theory in cognitive linguistics (with emphasis on the idea of “embodied schema”) and Hans Blumenberg’s historical metaphorology. Chapter 2 defines the ancient Chinese concept of “machine” and compares it with the Greek mechane in the Aristotelian corpus. Chapter 3 describes the embodied schema of the lever’s mechanical functions based on the Mohist Canon with philological analysis of its linguistic expressions. Chapter 4 analyzes the weighing metaphor in the moral philosophy of Mengzi and Xunzi. Lastly, Chapter 5 examines the leverage metaphor in the military philosophy of Sunzi and the political philosophy of Shen Dao.

Table of Contents:
Introduction
Theories of Metaphor
The Meaning of Machine
The Lever Schema
Balance
Leverage
Conclusion

The Way of the Barbarians: Redrawing Ethnic Boundaries in Tang and Song China

Author:
Shao-yun Yang

Publisher: 
University of Washington Press

Publication date:
October 22, 2019

Abstract:
Shao-yun Yang challenges assumptions that the cultural and socioeconomic watershed of the Tang-Song transition (800–1127 CE) was marked by a xenophobic or nationalist hardening of ethnocultural boundaries in response to growing foreign threats. In that period, reinterpretations of Chineseness and its supposed antithesis, “barbarism," were not straightforward products of political change but had their own developmental logic based in two interrelated intellectual shifts among the literati elite: the emergence of Confucian ideological and intellectual orthodoxy and the rise of neo-Confucian (daoxue) philosophy. New discourses emphasized the fluidity of the Chinese-barbarian dichotomy, subverting the centrality of cultural or ritual practices to Chinese identity and redefining the essence of Chinese civilization and its purported superiority. The key issues at stake concerned the acceptability of intellectual pluralism in a Chinese society and the importance of Confucian moral values to the integrity and continuity of the Chinese state. Through close reading of the contexts and changing geopolitical realities in which new interpretations of identity emerged, this intellectual history engages with ongoing debates over relevance of the concepts of culture, nation, and ethnicity to premodern China.

Table of Contents:
Han Yu, the Annals, and the origins of ethnicized orthodoxy
Han Yu, Liu Zongyuan, and the debate over Buddhism and barbarism
Ethnocentric moralism in two Late Tang essays
Ethnicized orthodoxy in the Northern Song guwen revival
Ideas of barbarization in eleventh-century Annals exegesis
Chineseness and barbarism in early Daoxue philosophy

The Art of War: A New Translation by Michael Nylan

Translator: 
Michael Nylan

Publisher: 
W. W. Norton & Company

Publication date:
January 7, 2020

Abstract:
Sun Tzu’s ancient book of strategy and psychology has as much to tell us today as when it was first written 2,500 years ago. In a world forever at odds, his rules for anticipating the motivations and strategies of our competitors never cease to inspire leaders of all kinds.

Michael Nylan, in her provocative introduction, sees new and unexpected lessons to be learned from The Art of War—in business ventures, relationships, games of skill, academic careers, and medical practices. Strategy, like conflict, is woven into society’s very roots.

Nylan’s crisp translation “offers a masterly new evaluation of this classic work, which balances the overtly military content with a profound and thought-provoking analysis” (Olivia Milburn). Readers newly engaging with ancient Chinese culture will be inspired by Nylan’s authoritative voice. Informed by years of scholarly study, Nylan is uniquely placed to introduce readers to Sun Tzu’s classic work through her detailed annotations on culture and the intricacies of translating ancient Chinese into modern English. She proves that Sun Tzu is more relevant than ever, helping us navigate the conflicts we know and those we have yet to endure.