Download Free The Civilization Of China Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Civilization Of China and write the review.

When published in 1982, this translation of Professor Jacques Gernet's masterly survey of the history and culture of China was immediately welcomed by critics and readers. This revised and updated edition makes it more useful for students and for the general reader concerned with the broad sweep of China's past.
Anthropologists, archaeologists, geographers, and historians chronicle the evolution of Chinese culture and history from antiquity to present times
The seventeen contributors to this interdisciplinary volume bring to the study of early China the analytical concerns of archeology, art history, botany, climatology, cultural and physical anthropology, ethnography, epigraphy, linguistics, metallurgy, and political and social history. Readers interested in such topics as the origin of rice or millet agriculture, the origin of writing, the nature of the trie, and the processes of state formation will find much value here. They will find, too, major hypotheses about teh cultural importance of ecogeographical zones in China, Neolithic interaction between the east coast and Central Plains, the remarkable homogeneity of early Chinese crania, and the links between the Hsia, Shang, and Chou dynasties. Relying on recently published archaeological evidence and the insights gained from carbon-14 and thermoluminescent datings, the authors provide original and significant interpretations of the nature of Chinese civilization in its formative stage and the processes by which civilizations form. Since there is little doubt that the complex of culture traits which defines Chinese civilization in the second and fist millennia B.C. developed from a Chinese Neolithic stage, the origin of the Chinese civilization is worth studying not only in its own right but as an instance of the indigenous development of civilizations in general. This volume will appeal to all who are intersted in the genesis of civilization and the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age; it summarizes that state of present knowledge about China and suggests research strategies and hypotheses for the future. Contributors:Noel BarnardK. C. ChangTe-Tzu ChangCheung Kwong-YueWayne H. FoggUrsula Martius FranklinMorton H. FriedW. W. HowellsLouisa G. Fitzgerald HuberKarl JettmarDavid N. KeightleyFang Kuei LiHui-Lin LiWilliam MeachamRichard PearsonE.G. PulleyblankRobert Orr Whyte This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1983.
Chinese Civilization sets the standard for supplementary texts in Chinese history courses. With newly expanded material, personal documents, social records, laws, and documents that historians mistakenly ignore, the sixth edition is even more useful than its classic predecessor. A complete and thorough introduction to Chinese history and culture.
Discover - or rediscover - the major achievements of Chinese culture and civilization.Great Books of China offers concise introductions - each of them accompanied by generous quotation (in English) from the book in question - to sixty-six works in the canon of Chinese literature.The books chosen reflect the chronological and thematic breadth of Chinese literary tradition, ranging from such classics as The Book of Songs and the Confucian Analects, through popular dramas and novels (The Romance of the Western Chamber; The Water Margin), twentieth-century political and biographical works (Quotations from Chairman Mao, the autobiography of the last emperor) and modern novels that are little known in the West (Memories of South Peking, Six Chapters from a Cadre School Life).Frances Wood presents a comprehensive, accessible and richly informative primer for the uninitiated; a box of delights that opens up an entire literary culture to the inquisitive reader.

China

The Editorial Committee of Chinese Civilization: A Source Book, City University of Hong Kong

Published: 2007-04-01

Total Pages: 833


Get eBook

Written with precision and flair by a host of leading academics from Beijing and Hong Kong, this single volume is a welcome addition to the study of world civilizations, a broad yet detailed chronological sweep through time. Every aspect of Chinese civilization is explained, interpreted, contextualized and brought to life with well-balanced commentary and photographic documentation. Published by City University of Hong Kong Press. 香港城市大學出版社出版。
This enlightening book leads readers though the history of ancient China, up to and through its decline, including how power was centralized within the Zhou royal house and aristocratic families that ruled their individual territories. This resource explains the Spring and Autumn periods, as well as Confucius’s influence, and the positive and negative aspects of the Qin Dynasty. Readers will be captivated by the ebb and flow of rulers, the excitement of peasant revolts, and rebellions that ultimately resulted in the fall of ancient China.
Chinese civilization from the origins to the tang dynasty.
Although they existed more than a millennium apart, the great civilizations of New Kingdom Egypt (ca. 1548-1086 BCE) and Han dynasty China (206 BCE-220 CE) shared intriguing similarities. Both were centered around major, flood-prone rivers--the Nile and the Yellow River--and established complex hydraulic systems to manage their power. Both spread their territories across vast empires that were controlled through warfare and diplomacy and underwent periods of radical reform led by charismatic rulers--the "heretic king" Akhenaten and the vilified reformer Wang Mang. Universal justice was dispensed through courts, and each empire was administered by bureaucracies staffed by highly trained scribes who held special status. Egypt and China each developed elaborate conceptions of an afterlife world and created games of fate that facilitated access to these realms. This groundbreaking volume offers an innovative comparison of these two civilizations. Through a combination of textual, art historical, and archaeological analyses, Ancient Egypt and Early China reveals shared structural traits of each civilization as well as distinctive features.
D. R. Howland explores China’s representations of Japan in the changing world of the late nineteenth century and, in so doing, examines the cultural and social borders between the two neighbors. Looking at Chinese accounts of Japan written during the 1870s and 1880s, he undertakes an unprecedented analysis of the main genres the Chinese used to portray Japan—the travel diary, poetry, and the geographical treatise. In his discussion of the practice of “brushtalk,” in which Chinese scholars communicated with the Japanese by exchanging ideographs, Howland further shows how the Chinese viewed the communication of their language and its dominant modes—history and poetry—as the textual and cultural basis of a shared civilization between the two societies. With Japan’s decision in the 1870s to modernize and westernize, China’s relationship with Japan underwent a crucial change—one that resulted in its decisive separation from Chinese civilization and, according to Howland, a destabilization of China’s worldview. His examination of the ways in which Chinese perceptions of Japan altered in the 1880s reveals the crucial choice faced by the Chinese of whether to interact with Japan as “kin,” based on geographical proximity and the existence of common cultural threads, or as a “barbarian,” an alien force molded by European influence. By probing China’s poetic and expository modes of portraying Japan, Borders of Chinese Civilization exposes the changing world of the nineteenth century and China’s comprehension of it. This broadly appealing work will engage scholars in the fields of Asian studies, Chinese literature, history, and geography, as well as those interested in theoretical reflections on travel or modernism.