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This book examines cities of the Jiangnan region of south-central China between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries, an area considered to be the model of a successfully developing regional economy. The six studies focus on the urban centers of Suzhou, Hangzhou, Yangzhou, and Shanghai. Emphasizing the regional focus, the authors explore the interconnections and sequential relationships between these major cities and analyze common themes such as the development of handicraft industry, transport and commerce, class structure, ethnic diversity and internal immigration, and the social and political pressures generated by developments in manufacturing, taxes, and government politics. The book provides a valuable resource on commercial development and internal economic and social development in pre-modern China, particularly on specific regional development and the historical role of traditional Chinese cities.
During China's late imperial period (roughly 1400-1900 CE), men would gather by the millions every two or three years outside official examination compounds sprinkled across China. Only one percent of candidates would complete the academic regimen that would earn them a post in the administrative bureaucracy. Civil Examinations assesses the role of education, examination, and China's civil service in fostering the world's first professional class based on demonstrated knowledge and skill. While millions of men dreamed of the worldly advancement an imperial education promised, many more wondered what went on inside the prestigious walled-off examination compounds. As Benjamin A. Elman reveals, what occurred was the weaving of a complex social web. Civil examinations had been instituted in China as early as the seventh century CE, but in the Ming and Qing eras they were the nexus linking the intellectual, political, and economic life of imperial China. Local elites and members of the court sought to influence how the government regulated the classical curriculum and selected civil officials. As a guarantor of educational merit, civil examinations served to tie the dynasty to the privileged gentry and literati classes--both ideologically and institutionally. China did away with its classical examination system in 1905. But this carefully balanced and constantly contested piece of social engineering, worked out over the course of centuries, was an early harbinger of the meritocratic regime of college boards and other entrance exams that undergirds higher education in much of the world today.
This book is a comprehensive study of faithful maidenhood in late imperial China from the vantage points of state policy, local history, scholarly debate, and the faithful maiden’s own subjective point of view.
In the West, love occupies center stage in the modern age, whether in art, intellectual life, or the economic life. We may observe a similar development in China, on its own impetus, which has resulted in this characteristic of modernity--this feature of modern life has been securely and unambiguously established, not the least facilitated by the thriving of literature about qing, whether in traditional or modern forms. Qiancheng Li concentrates on the nuances of a similar trend manifested in the Chinese context. The emphasis is on critical readings of the texts that have shaped this trend, including important Ming- and Qing-dynasty works of drama, Buddhist texts and other religious/philosophical works, in all their subtlety and evocative power. "The power of qing or strong emotion is a major theme in late imperial Chinese literature--some writers asserting that it can transcend even life itself. Qiancheng Li surveys a number of seventeenth-century philosophical, religious, and literary texts to elucidate the metaphysical aspects of emotional attachment and of sexual desire in particular. Through his broad and penetrating reading, Li demonstrates incontrovertibly how, to seventeenth-century writers, qing and religion were inextricably linked. To those writers, qing could bring enlightenment, and certainly Li’s study enlightens its readers to new levels of complexity in major literary works of that period. Transmutations of Desire sets a major new milestone in the study of traditional Chinese culture."--Robert E. Hegel, Washington University in St. Louis
Based on case files, this study explores the social significance of the traditional Chinese legal system, and investigates how people utilized the courts during the course of criminal and civil disputes. The author emphasizes the ways in which law shaped social and economic change and how in turn the legal code and court system were adapted to local realities.
An innovative look at how families in Ming dynasty China negotiated military and political obligations to the state How did ordinary people in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) deal with the demands of the state? In The Art of Being Governed, Michael Szonyi explores the myriad ways that families fulfilled their obligations to provide a soldier to the army. The complex strategies they developed to manage their responsibilities suggest a new interpretation of an important period in China’s history as well as a broader theory of politics. Using previously untapped sources, including lineage genealogies and internal family documents, Szonyi examines how soldiers and their families living on China’s southeast coast minimized the costs and maximized the benefits of meeting government demands for manpower. Families that had to provide a soldier for the army set up elaborate rules to ensure their obligation was fulfilled, and to provide incentives for the soldier not to desert his post. People in the system found ways to gain advantages for themselves and their families. For example, naval officers used the military’s protection to engage in the very piracy and smuggling they were supposed to suppress. Szonyi demonstrates through firsthand accounts how subjects of the Ming state operated in a space between defiance and compliance, and how paying attention to this middle ground can help us better understand not only Ming China but also other periods and places. Combining traditional scholarship with innovative fieldwork in the villages where descendants of Ming subjects still live, The Art of Being Governed illustrates the ways that arrangements between communities and the state hundreds of years ago have consequences and relevance for how we look at diverse cultures and societies, even today.
Though Jesuits assumed a variety of roles as missionaries in late imperial China, their most memorable guise was that of scientific expert, whose maps, clocks, astrolabes, and armillaries reportedly astonished the Chinese. But the icon of the missionary-scientist is itself a complex myth. Masterfully correcting the standard story of China Jesuits as simple conduits for Western science, Florence C. Hsia shows how these missionary-scientists remade themselves as they negotiated the place of the profane sciences in a religious enterprise. Sojourners in a Strange Land develops a genealogy of Jesuit conceptions of scientific life within the Chinese mission field from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Analyzing the printed record of their endeavors in natural philosophy and mathematics, Hsia identifies three models of the missionary man of science by their genres of writing: mission history, travelogue, and academic collection. Drawing on the history of early modern Europe’s scientific, religious, and print culture, she uses the elaboration and reception of these scientific personae to construct the first collective biography of the Jesuit missionary-scientist’s many incarnations in late imperial China.
This work explores interactions between society and environment in China's most important marine fishery, the Zhoushan Archipelago off the coast of Zhejiang and Jiangsu, from its 19th-century expansion to the exhaustion of the most important fish species in the 1970s.
The need for heirs in any traditional society is a compelling one. In traditional China, where inheritance and notions of filiality depended on the production of progeny, the need was nearly absolute. As Ann Waltner makes clear in this broadly researched study of adoption in the late Ming and early Ch'ing periods, the getting of an heir was a complex, even paradoxical undertaking. Although adoption involving persons of the same surname was the only arrangement ritually and legally sanctioned in Chinese society, adoption of persons of a different surname was a relatively common practice. Using medical and ritual texts, legal codes, local gazetteers, biography, and fiction, Waltner examines the multiple dimensions of the practice of adoption and identifies not only the dominant ideology prohibiting adoption across surname lines, but also a parallel discourse justifying the practice.