The Many Lives of the First Emperor of China

Author:
Anthony J. Barbieri-Low

Publication date: 
August 2022

Publisher:
University of Washington Press

Abstract:

Ying Zheng, founder of the Qin empire, is recognized as a pivotal figure in world history, alongside other notable conquerors such as Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and Julius Caesar. His accomplishments include conquest of the warring states of ancient China, creation of an imperial system that endured for two millennia, and unification of Chinese culture through the promotion of a single writing system.
Only one biased historical account, written a century after his death in 210 BCE, narrates his biography. Recently, however, archaeologists have revealed the lavish pits associated with his tomb and documents that demonstrate how his dynasty functioned. Debates about the First Emperor have raged since shortly after his demise, making him an ideological slate upon which politicians, revolutionaries, poets, painters, archaeologists, and movie directors have written their own biases, fears, and fantasies.

This book is neither a standard biography nor a dynastic history. Rather, it looks historically at interpretations of the First Emperor in history, literature, archaeology, and popular culture as a way to understand the interpreters as much as the subject of their interpretation.

Table of Contents:

Part 1: The Historical First Emperor of China -- Sima Qian and His Tragic Hero -- The Confucians' Villain and His Rehabilitation -- The Class Representative and the Nation Builder -- 

Part 2: Unearthed Voices from the Qin Conquest -- Voices of the Qin State -- Voices of the People -- 

Part 3: Great Characters and Events -- The Assassin and the Evil Eunuch -- Burning the Books and Killing the Scholars -- 

Part 4: The First Emperor in the Cultural Imagination -- Tales of the First Emperor -- The First Emperor on Screen -- Imagining the First Emperor's Tomb.

[Dissertation] Taming Metals : the Use of Leaded Bronze in Early China, 2000-1250 Bc

Author:
Huan, Limin

School:
University of Oxford (United Kingdom) 

Year:
2021
30216883

Abstract:
It has long been known that leaded bronze, an alloy consisting primarily of copper with the addition of tin and lead, was widely used in early China, starting from around the second millennium BC. The additional lead distinguishes this metal from common bronze, the copper-tin binary alloy, used by most other Early Metal Age civilisations in Eurasia. The reasons behind the use of leaded bronze have not been fully examined in previous literature. In this thesis, the discussion of metallurgical technologies and the studies on material properties are combined with four case studies of early metal-using communities to reinvestigate the use of leaded bronze in early China. With this approach, the thesis challenges the wide held notion that lead was consciously added by the craftspeople, mainly to facilitate the casting. Instead, I argue that the widespread of leaded bronze objects was mainly due to both the socio-economic concerns in making bronze ritual vessels in Central China and the recycling and reuse of the metals by other communities around Central China. Moreover, the seemingly common use of leaded bronze does not reflect a uniform acceptance of a single set of knowledge and know-how. Rather, people in different communities responded differently to this new material and chose to engage it in different ways. This study on leaded bronze provides us with a new perspective to recognise the complexity and diversity of technology and material culture in early Chinese communities. Meanwhile, through the active discussion on the theoretical frameworks and research methods for archaeometallurgy and material culture studies, I also suggest approaches which may be useful in future studies of early metallurgy and other craft production.

Early Medieval China 29 (2023) Special Issue: The Margins of the Human in Medieval China

Table of Contents:

Editor’s Note
XIAOFEI TIAN

ARTICLES
Mistaken Identities: Negotiating Passing and Replacement in Chinese Records of the Strange
ANTJE RICHTER

Nonhuman Self-Cultivators in Early Medieval China: Re-reading a Story Type
ROBERT FORD CAMPANY

Diverging Conceptions of Apotheosis in Mid-Fourth Century CE Upper Purity Daoism
JONATHAN E. E. PETTIT

Animality, Humanity, and Divine Power: Exploring Implicit Cannibalism in Medieval Weretiger Stories
MANLING LUO

REVIEW ARTICLEBringing Scholarship on the Early Medieval Period to a Broader Audience: A Review of The Cambridge History of China, vol. 2, The Six Dynasties, 220–589, edited by Albert E. Dien and Keith N. Knapp

PATRICIA BUCKLEY EBREY

BOOK REVIEWS
Jack W. Chen, Anecdote, Network, Gossip, Performance: Essays on the Shishuo xinyu
GRAHAM SANDERS

Xurong Kong, Fu Poetry along the Silk Roads: Third-Century Chinese Writings on Exotica
QIULEI HU

Yue Zhang, Lore and Verse: Poems on History in Early Medieval China
FUSHENG WU

Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/yemc20/current

[Dissertation] Philological Botany: The Poetics of Plant Classification in Early China and Japan

Author:

Loren Waller

School:

Yale University

Year:

2023

30312999

Abstract: 

Flowering plants are a primary topic in Chinese and Japanese poetry, often used figuratively to express human emotions. Over time, as poets alluded to earlier works, these plants developed conventional metaphorical meanings. It is natural that such meanings would shift over time, but what is also striking is that historical understandings of the plants themselves, as well as the names used for the plants, also changed over time. An examination of three case studies will show how the identities of these plants changed over time as they were collected within literary texts and commentaries.
Chapter 1 on the hibiscus (Ch. mujin; J. asagaho, kikkyō, kenikoshi, mukuge) demonstrates the broad diversity of different flowers that share the same name, as well as the references to this ambiguity within some poetic works themselves. This chapter also introduces the complexity of the textual commentary tradition and considers how texts may be interpreted through reading between the lines of commentaries on literary works.

Chapter 2 on the orange tree (Ch. ju; J. tachibana) shows how the trope of regional loyalty to southern China changed as it was adopted in Japan. More than other plants with a shared cultural heritage between China and Japan, the Japanese tachibana developed dominant allusive connotations based on a well-known poem in the Kokinwakashū (905). Still, Chinese examples were not unknown in Japan, and it is productive to consider how Japanese texts might be reinterpreted considering alternative pretexts.

Chapter 3 on the plum looks at how a plant marked as representative of China became domesticated in Japan over time. While there are no plum poems in the Kojiki (712), Nihonshoki (720), or the early period of the Man’yōshū, plum poems and banquets suddenly became popular around the time of a well-known plum banquet at the residence of Ōtomo no Tabito in 730, making plums the second most popular plant in the Man’yōshū poetic anthology. The proliferation was so thorough that plum poems were anachronistically attributed to earlier times. The most extreme case was one commentary’s claim that the plum was the subject of the famous Naniwazu poem, which was also associated with an encounter with a Wani, a scribe from Paekche who was said to have brought writing in Japan in the early fifth century. Another wonderous tale of the plum is the famous flying plum of the apotheosized statesman-poet Sugawara no Michizane (845-903), whose plum tree from Kyoto uprooted and flew to be with him when he was exiled to Dazaifu. Such narratives show how the plum could be seen as a representative Japanese plant.

In addition to tracing the literary history of these important plant tropes, this study also offers cases studies of how plant metaphors are used in cases when the identities of the plants themselves change over time, between languages, or between genres.

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Chapter 1. Of the Hibiscus and Fleeting Faces
Chapter 2. Of Orange Trees and Transplantation
Chapter 3. Of Plums and Origins

Animals and Plants in Chinese Religions and Science

Author:
Huaiyu Chen

Year:
2023

Publisher:
Anthem Press

Abstract:
In ancient China, the tradition of observing nature is combined with Yin-Yang and the Five-Phase theories, which were later incorporated into the ancient arts of divination, including the technique of predicting weather changes by observing the behavior and health of animals. The observation of the close connection between animals and weather developed into the worship of animals, that is, what can be called the cult of animals. Plant science and technology in medieval China cannot be separated from the developments in agriculture, economics, and medicine, as well as cultural practice. The Chinese empire ruled most of East Asia in the medieval period. Numerous species of plants were observed, cultivated, harvested, and used in the vast land of China that spanned a wide range of biomes from boreal through to temperate and tropical, with most regions classed as subtropical. Besides indigenous plants, many plants from West, Central, South, and Southeast Asia were introduced into China and East Asia in general. Numerous zoomantic practices appeared in two sets of textual documents in the premodern Chinese bibliographical system, namely official documents and popular documents. Official documents were often compiled by government officials and served political governance objectives. These documents included official histories, annals, and institutional documents, as well as Confucian classics. The authorship or editorship of these documents was often explicit. Popular documents included strange writings, tales, legends, and religious documents from Buddhism and Daoism, which were often not compiled under the sponsorship and support of the court or government. They might be compiled by literati but lost original authorship. They did not serve political motivations and objectives, reflecting how people understood and interpreted correlative cosmology by observing animal behaviors at the local or non-bureaucratic level.

Table of Contents:
Introduction; 
Plant Science and Technology in Medieval China; 
Ordering Plants in the Buddhist World: A Medieval Botanical Taxonomy; 
Animal Divination and Climate: An Environmental Perspective on the Cult of the Pig; 
Zoomancy in Medieval China; 
The Changing Images of Zodiac Animals in Medieval Chinese Buddhist Literature; 
The Were-Tigers in Medieval China and Its Asian Context; 
The Animal Turn in Asian Studies and the Asian Turn in the Animal Studies

In the Land of Tigers and Snakes: Living with Animals in Medieval Chinese Religions

Author:
Huaiyu Chen

Publisher:
Columbia University Press

Year:
2023

Abstract: 
Animals play crucial roles in Buddhist thought and practice. However, many symbolically or culturally significant animals found in India, where Buddhism originated, do not inhabit China, to which Buddhism spread in the medieval period. In order to adapt Buddhist ideas and imagery to the Chinese context, writers reinterpreted and modified the meanings different creatures possessed. Medieval sources tell stories of monks taming wild tigers, detail rituals for killing snakes, and even address the question of whether a parrot could achieve enlightenment.

Huaiyu Chen examines how Buddhist ideas about animals changed and were changed by medieval Chinese culture. He explores the entangled relations among animals, religions, the state, and local communities, considering both the multivalent meanings associated with animals and the daily experience of living with the natural world. Chen illustrates how Buddhism influenced Chinese knowledge and experience of animals as well as how Chinese state ideology, Daoism, and local cultic practices reshaped Buddhism. He shows how Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism developed doctrines, rituals, discourses, and practices to manage power relations between animals and humans.

Drawing on a wide range of sources, including traditional texts, stone inscriptions, manuscripts, and visual culture, this interdisciplinary book bridges history, religious studies, animal studies, and environmental studies. In examining how Buddhist depictions of the natural world and Chinese taxonomies of animals mutually enriched each other, In the Land of Tigers and Snakes offers a new perspective on how Buddhism took root in Chinese society.

TOC:
Introduction
1. Buddhists Categorizing Animals: Medieval Chinese Classification
2. Confucians Civilizing Unruly Beasts: Tigers and Pheasants
3. Buddhists Taming Felines: The Companionship of the Tiger
4. Daoists Transforming Ferocious Tigers: Practical Techniques and Rhetorical Strategies
5. Buddhists Killing Reptiles: Snakes in Religious Competition
6. Buddhists Enlightening Virtuous Birds: The Parrot as a Religious Agent
Epilogue