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Ernst Boerschmann was the most influential foreign architectural researcher in China in the first half of the twentieth century. This book concerns his three-year research expedition through the Chinese Empire (1906–1909). He was the first Westerner to systematically document China’s religious architecture, returning from his travels with thousands of photographs, sketches, and architectural surveys. His six major publications leading up to 1931, described here alongside the reactions they caused, were milestones on the path to formal study of Chinese architectural history, long before Chinese academics themselves began to take interest in the subject in the 1930s.
This text traces the history of three Far Eastern embassies through the vicissitudes of war and revolution against the background of an apparent steady decline of Western influence in Asia. Dr Hoare tracks the key events and people shaping the British view of Asia. Key 'dramatis personae' are Sir Harry Parkes, British Minister to Japan, China and Korea; Sir Ernest Satow, the student interpreter who became Minister in Tokyo and Peking, and in more recent years, Sir Charles Eliot, lover of big cars and scholar of Buddhism. This book will interest those wishing to know more about all aspects of Britain in East Asia, whether in the tense years of the Boxer troubles in China, during the wartime repatriation of Britons from Japan and the Japanese Empire, in the traumas of the Korean War, or during the excess of China's Cultural Revolution.
The central character in Susan Naquin's extraordinary new book is the city of Peking during the Ming and Qing periods. Using the city's temples as her point of entry, Naquin carefully excavates Peking's varied public arenas, the city's transformation over five centuries, its human engagements, and its rich cultural imprint. This study shows how modern Beijing's glittering image as China's great and ancient capital came into being and reveals the shifting identities of a much more complex past, one whose rich social and cultural history Naquin splendidly evokes. Temples, by providing a place where diverse groups could gather without the imprimatur of family or state, made possible a surprising assortment of community-building and identity-defining activities. By revealing how religious establishments of all kinds were used for fairs, markets, charity, tourism, politics, and leisured sociability, Naquin shows their decisive impact on Peking and, at the same time, illuminates their little-appreciated role in Chinese cities generally. Lacking most of the conventional sources for urban history, she has relied particularly on a trove of commemorative inscriptions that express ideas about the relationship between human beings and gods, about community service and public responsibility, about remembering and being remembered. The result is a book that will be essential reading in the field of Chinese studies for years to come.
"When I went to Brazil in 1890, I was always comparing and contrasting that country and her people with my country and my people; and to me, mine were always superior...the attitude of superiority I had taken made it impossible to accumulate anything [of value]. When Sarah Pike Conger and her husband, Ambassador Edwin H. Conger (Civil War Major), left Brazil to take a new post in China, she could not have been more excited. But within months of their arrival, the violent Boxer Rebellion broke out. In letters to family and friends, Sarah Conger details her fascination with China and the Chinese and the desperate anxiety of the 45-day siege of the foreign legations during her husband's tenure. Though death and destruction were part of their early experience in China, the Congers came to love the country. They visited royalty and Mrs. Conger seemed especially impressed with the Dowager Empress, of whom she writes a great deal in this book and with whom she became friends. They also visited Japan during their trips to and from China and she records the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War. Long out of print, this fascinating book is available for the first time as an affordable, well-formatted edition for e-readers and smartphones. Be sure to LOOK INSIDE or download a sample.
Looking beyond the familiar trappings of the cult of female chastity—such as hagiographies of widows and chastity shrines--in late imperial China, this book explores the cult's political significance and practical ramifications in everyday life during the eighteenth century. In the first full-length study of the subject, Janet Theiss examines a vast number of laws, legal cases, regulations, and policies to illustrate the social and political processes through which female virtue was defined, enforced, and contested. Along the way, she provides rich details of social life and cultural practices among ordinary Chinese people through narratives of criminal cases of sexual assault, harassment, adultery, and domestic violence.
In The Dawn of Astronomy, Lockyer looks at various Egyptian monuments and their relationship to astronomy. He posits in this nonfiction novel that dating of pyramids and various Egyptian architecture can be achieved through looking at the stars.