Author:
Charles Sanft
Publisher:
SUNY Press
Publication date:
May 2019
Abstract:
Through an examination of archaeologically recovered texts from China’s northwestern border regions, argues for widespread interaction with texts in the Han period. This book examines ancient written materials from China’s northwestern border regions to offer fresh insights into the role of text in shaping society and culture during the Han period (206/2 BCE–220 CE). Left behind by military installations, these documents—wooden strips and other nontraditional textual materials such as silk—recorded the lives and activities of military personnel and the people around them. Charles Sanft explores their functions and uses by looking at a fascinating array of material, including posted texts on signaling across distances, practical texts on brewing beer and evaluating swords, and letters exchanged by officials working in low rungs of the bureaucracy. By focusing on all members of the community, he argues that a much broader section of early society had meaningful interactions with text than previously believed. This major shift in interpretation challenges long-standing assumptions about the limited range of influence that text and literacy had on culture and society and makes important contributions to early China studies, the study of literacy, and to the global history of non-elites.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
1. Interacting with Text in Early Imperial China and Beyond
2. Contexts and Sources
3. Posted Texts
4. Statements of Individuals and Groups
5. Composite Texts
6. Practical Texts
7. Cultural Texts
8. Letters
Conclusion
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
Editor:
髙村武幸 (TAKAMURA Takeyuki)
Publisher:
六一書房
Publication Date:
September, 2017
Table of Contents:
前 言
第1 部 秦の周縁領域
渡邉 英幸 「戦国秦の国境を越えた人びと ─岳麓秦簡『為獄等状』の「邦亡」と「帰義」を中心に─」
目黒 杏子 「秦代県下の「廟」─里耶秦簡と岳麓書院蔵秦簡「秦律令」にみえる諸廟の考察─」
第2 部 漢代西北部周縁領域の考察
廣瀬 薫雄 「漢代酒泉郡表是県城遺跡を探して ─草溝井城調査記─」
青木 俊介 「漢代肩水地区A32 所在機関とその業務関係 ─肩水金関と肩水東部を中心に─」
髙村 武幸 「前漢後半期以降の河西地域に対する物資供給 ─漢代辺郡の存在意義を考える手がかりとして─」
第3 部 周縁の地域社会とその構成員
鈴木 直美 「漢代フロンティア形成者のプロフィール ─居延漢簡・肩水金関漢簡にみる卒の年齢に着目して─」
飯田 祥子 「公孫述政権の興亡 ─両漢交替期地域政権の一事例─」
鷲尾 祐子 「終の棲家 ─女性の帰属に関する試論─」
後 記
Author:
Hsieh, Mei-Yu
Year:
2011
School:
Stanford University
Advisor:
Lewis, Mark E.
Abstract:
This dissertation examines in the continental context the building and maintenance of the Han state, which existed in the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers regions roughly from the second century B.C.E. to the second century C.E. It surveys the trajectory that transformed the Han state from a regional polity confined to the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers regions to a trans-regional superpower, exerting its influence across East Eurasia. I focus specifically on the interstate interaction between the Yellow River region (the Han), on the steppe (the Xiongnu), and in the Tarim Basin (multiple oasis-states) from the beginning of the second century B.C.E. to the early first century C.E. as my case study.
Making use of both transmitted and excavated Han texts, I demonstrate that two major mechanisms facilitated the transformative process of the Han state in the political landscape of East Eurasia. One was horizontal kin ties between the Han emperor and peer rulers. The other was the vertically-structured imperial bureaucracy that organized communities in the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers regions for imperial power-building.
In particular, the imperial bureaucracy evolved into the nodal mechanism to sustain imperial initiatives. On the one hand, it vertically incorporated into its writing-based system individuals of diverse social, cultural, and geographic backgrounds in the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers regions as the support base of the Han emperor. On the other hand, it horizontally facilitated the emperor's kinship-based alliance network across East Eurasia. This bureaucratic mechanism became the backbone that continued to weave together complex communities in the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers regions regardless of the rise and fall of ruling houses.
Author:
Alice Yao
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Publication Year:
2016
Abstract:
Although long considered to be a barren region on the periphery of ancient Chinese civilization, the southwest massif was once the political heartland of numerous Bronze Age kingdoms. Their distinctive material tradition--intricately cast bronze kettle drums and cowrie shell containers--have given archaeologists and historians a glimpse of the extraordinary wealth, artistry, and power exercised by highland leaders in prehistory. After a millennium of rule however, imperial conquest under the Han state reduced local power, leading to the disappearance of Bronze Age traditions and a fraught process of assimilation.
Instead of a clash between center and periphery or barbarism and civilization, The Ancient Highlands of Southwest China examines the classic study of imperial conquest as a confrontation of different political times. Alice Yao grounds an archaeological account of the region where local landscape histories and funerary traditions bring to light a history of competing elite lineages, warrior cultures, and of kingly genealogies. In particular, this book illustrates how buried precious material objects--drums, ornate weaponry, and cowries--enabled the transmission and memorialization of biographies and lineage wealth across successive generations. A provocative picture emerges of imperial absorption and change as a problem entangling the generational time of highland leadership and its political cycles and the penetration of Chinese dynastic history as well as time of bureaucracy and state economy. Yao extends conventional approaches to empires to show how prehistoric forms of temporal experience can complicate imperial efforts to incorporate and unify time.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I. De-centering a historicity of the periphery
1. History regained in prehistory
2. Death and funerary ritual: where multiple time frames converge
Part II. Bronze Age histories
3. Time and place in the early Bronze Age
4. Bronze kettledrums and iconic halberds: the political symbols of an emerging regional tradition (650-500BC)
5. A southwest political time (500-250BC)
Part III. Native subjects and Han rule
6. A divided and entangled imperial frontier
7. The d(eb)atability of the past: the past in the imperial present
Author:
Clark, Hugh R
Publisher:
University Of Hawai'i Press
Publication Year:
2015
Abstract:
This work engages two of the most neglected themes in China’s long history: the integration of lands south of the Yangtze River into China and its impact on Chinese culture. The roots of Chinese civilization are commonly traced to the North. For millennia after the foundations of the northern culture had been laid, the South was not part of its mandate, and long after the imperial center had claimed political control in the late first millennium BCE, it remained culturally distinct. Yet for the past one thousand years the South has been the cultural, demographic, economic—and, on occasion, political—center of China. The process whereby this was accomplished has long been overlooked in Chinese historiography.
Hugh Clark offers a new perspective on the process of assimilation and accommodation that led to the new alignment. He begins by focusing on the stages of encounter between the sinitic north and the culturally diverse and alien south. Initially northerners and southerners looked on each other with antipathy: To the former, the non-sinitic inhabitants of the South were “barbarians.” To these “barbarians,” northerners were arrogantly hegemonic. Such attitudes led to patterns of resistance and alienation across the South that endured for many centuries until, as Clark suggests, the South grew in importance within the empire—a development that was finally recognized under the Song.
Clark’s approach to the second theme poses a fundamental challenge to what is meant by “Chinese culture.” Drawing on his long familiarity with southern Fujian, he closely examines the pre-sinitic cultural and religious heritage as well as later cults on the southeast coast to argue that an enduring legacy of pre-sinitic indigenous southern culture contributed significantly to late imperial and modern China, effectively challenging the paradigm of northern cultural hegemony that has dominated Chinese history for centuries.
The Sinitic Encounter in Southeast China is a path-breaking book that puts long-neglected issues back on the historian’s table for further investigation.
Table of Contents:
"The civilizing mission" and the historiographical context
Northern perceptions of the pre-Sinitic south
The Sinitic accommodation with the south
Social innovation in the eleventh century and the debates on civilization
The central coast through the eighth century
The Sinitic encounter
Cults of the Sinitic era: a narrative of appropriation and civilization
Civilizing the god of Baidu: a case study in civilizing strategy
Conclusions
Author:
Erica Brindley
Publication Year:
2015
Publisher:
Cambridge Press
Abstract:
In this innovative study, Erica Brindley examines how, during the period 400 BCE–50 CE, an embryonic Chinese empire interacted with peoples referred to as the Yue/Viet along its southern frontier. Brindley provides an overview of current theories in archaeology and linguistics concerning the peoples of the ancient southern frontier of China, the closest relations on the mainland to certain later Southeast Asian and Polynesian peoples. Through analysis of warring states and early Han textual sources, she shows how representations of Chinese and Yue identity invariably fed upon, and often grew out of, a mutually defining process of centering the self while de-centering the other. Examining rebellions, pivotal ruling figures from various Yue states, and key moments of Yue agency, Brindley demonstrates the complexities involved in identity formation and cultural hybridization in the ancient world and the ancestry of cultures associated with southern China and Vietnam to the present day.
Table of Contents:
Part I. Orientations: Definitions and Disciplinary Discussions: Introduction: concepts and frameworks
1. Who were the Yue?
2. Linguistic research on the Yue/Viet
3. The archaeological record
Part II. Timelines, Maps, and Political Histories of the Yue State and Han-Period Yue Kingdoms, 500 BCE–110 BCE:
4. Political histories of the Yue state and Han-period Yue kingdoms, 500 BCE–110 BCE
Part III. Performing Hua-Xia, Inscribing Yue: Rhetoric, Rites, and Tags:
5. The rhetoric of cultural superiority and conceptualizations of ethnicity
6. Tropes of the savage: physical markers of Yue identity
7. Savage landscapes and magical objects
Part IV. Performing Yue: Political Drama, Intrigue, and Armed Resistance:
8. Yue identity as political masquerade and ritual modeling
9. Yue identity as armed resistance to the Han imperium
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Editors:
Ping Wang & Nicholas Morrow Williams
Publisher:
Hong Kong University Press
Publication Year:
2015
Abstract:
From ancient times, China's remote and exotic South—a shifting and expanding region beyond the Yangtze River—has been an enduring theme in Chinese literature. For poets and scholar-officials in medieval China, the South was a barbaric frontier region of alienation and disease. But it was also a place of richness and fascination, and for some a site of cultural triumph over exile. The eight essays in this collection explore how tensions between pride in southern culture and anxiety over the alien qualities of the southern frontier were behind many of the distinctive features of medieval Chinese literature. They examine how prominent writers from this period depicted themselves and the South in poetic form through attitudes that included patriotic attachment and bitter exile. By the Tang dynasty, poetic symbols and clichés about the exotic South had become well established, though many writers were still able to use these in innovative ways.
Southern Identity and Southern Estrangement in Medieval Chinese Poetry is the first work in English to examine the cultural south in classical Chinese poetry. The book incorporates original research on key poets, such as Lu Ji, Jiang Yan, Wang Bo, and Li Bai. It also offers a broad survey of cultural and historical trends during the medieval period, as depicted in poetry. The book will be of interest to students of Chinese literature and cultural history.
Table of Contents:
1. Southland as Symbol
—Ping Wang and Nicholas Morrow Williams
2. Southern Metal and Feather Fan: The "Southern Consciousness" of Lu Ji
—David R. Knechtges
3. Fan Writing: Lu Ji, Lu Yun and the Cultural Transactions between North and South
—Xiaofei Tian
4. Plaint, Lyricism, and the South
—Ping Wang
5. Farther South: Jiang Yan in Darkest Fujian
—Paul W. Kroll
6. The Pity of Spring: A Southern Topos Reimagined by Wang Bo and Li Bai
—Nicholas Morrow Williams
7. The Stele and the Drunkard: Two Poetic Allusions from Xiangyang
—Jie Wu
8. Jiangnan from the Ninth Century On: The Routinization of Desire
—Stephen Owen
作者 Author:
Wallace, Leslie V
提交年份 Year:
2010
學校 School:
University of Pittsburgh
指導教授 Advisor:
Katheryn Linduff
摘要 Abstract:
During the first and second centuries CE colonists living along the Northern Frontier of the Han Empire built tombs with stone doorways that depicted scenes of the hunt. These reliefs depict a fabulous world inhabited by mounted archers, hybrid xian (immortals) and frolicking/fleeing animals. Within these reliefs there is also a limited tendency to draw on the alternate lifestyles of the Xiongnu, a confederation of northern nomadic tribes who served as both neighbor and foe to the Han Chinese who lived in this area.
Previous scholarship has seen hunting imagery in these reliefs as passive reflections of the mixed culture and economy of the region. I instead maintain that it was part of an iconographical program that depicted and facilitated the passage of the deceased to paradise across the dangerous borderlands between Heaven and Earth.
My dissertation argues that imagery in Shaanxi and Shanxi was actually a refinement of earlier Eastern Zhou (771-221 BCE) and Western Han (206BC- 8CE) depictions of the hunt and immortals, but that in this region, the positioning of the hunt at doorways created a liminal space representing the "Great Boundary" between this world and the next. This world is described in an inscription from a tomb excavated in Suide, Shaanxi that warns the deceased of the dangers that confront him if he does not return to the world of the living. On the basis of this inscription and similar "soul-summoning" passages from the Chu ci (Songs of the South) and Eastern Han dynasty tomb-quelling texts (zhenmu wen 鎮墓文), I argue that hunting imagery in Shaanxi and Shanxi belongs to the desolate spaces that were believed to exist between this world and the next.
Furthermore, I conclude that these images were a local response adopted by the patrons because they lived in a militarized, colonized setting in which fears of foreign neighbors fused with their apprehensions of the 'beyond'.
