This book offers the first comprehensive and systematic introduction to the origins and development of China’s genealogy, as well as its fundamental role in eugenics, ethics, politics and culture throughout China’s history.This book is divided into two parts: chronological research and thematic research. The first part explains the definition, origin, birth, development, transformation, optimization, popularization and contemporary status of China’s genealogy, while the second addr...

Trenchant, sophisticated, and cynical, Han Feizi has been read in every age and is still of interest today when people are more than ever concerned with the nature and use of power. Han Feizi (280?-233 B.C.), a prince of Han, was a representative of the Fa-chia, or Legalist, school of philosophy and produced the final and most readable exposition of its theories. His handbook for the ruler deals with the problems of strengthening and preserving the state, the way of the ruler, the use of p...

In early China, was it correct for a woman to disobey her father, contradict her husband, or shape the public policy of a son who ruled over a dynasty or state? According to the Lienü zhuan, or Categorized Biographies of Women, it was not only appropriate but necessary for women to step in with wise counsel when fathers, husbands, or rulers strayed from the path of virtue.Compiled toward the end of the Former Han dynasty (202 BCE-9 CE) by Liu Xiang (79-8 BCE), the...

The staggering story of the most important Chinese political dissident of the Mao era, a devout Christian who was imprisoned, tortured, and executed by the regimeBlood Letters tells the astonishing tale of Lin Zhao, a poet and journalist arrested by the authorities in 1960 and executed eight years later, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. The only Chinese citizen known to have openly and steadfastly opposed communism under Mao, she rooted her dissen...

Frank Ching brings to life 900 years of Chinese history through his own fascinating family tree. Beginning with his search for the grave of his first recorded ancestor, the 11th century poet Qin Guan, and ending with a moving account of his relationship with his father, a victim of China's historic upheaval, Frank Ching introduces a colourful cast of characters. His unbroken family line includes - among many others - a lovelorn concubine, a traitor, a military hero, an imperial ghost-write...

The Manchu people, a nomadic tribe from the northeast, rose up in 1616 and took the lead for the new era. The great leader Nurhaci step by step took control of the weakened empire. His successors went on to drive away Russian incursions, to re-unite with Taiwan, and to settle unrest in the regions. Tax reforms and administrative improvements helped solidify the gains.Stability brought prosperity, and prosperity enabled noteworthy innovations in technology and the arts. The Qing Dynasty's g...

The Taiping Rebellion was one of the costliest civil wars in human history. Many millions of people lost their lives. Yet while the Rebellion has been intensely studied by scholars in China and elsewhere, we still know little of how individuals coped with these cataclysmic events.Drawing upon a rich array of primary sources, What Remains explores the issues that preoccupied Chinese and Western survivors. Individuals, families, and communities grappled with fundamental que...

A beggar, an itinerant monk, leapt to greatness during a tumultuous epoch and went on to found the Ming Dynasty of China (1368-1644).As a destitute peasant with nothing to lose, he started a local rebellion; success built on success. Defeating local warlords, Zhu Yuan Zhang conquered all the southern part of China, then sent his army north and unified the rest.Zhu Yuan Zhang broke out of a desperate life of poverty to reach the heights, using his intelligence, strength and...

From 1885–1924, China underwent a period of acute political struggle and cultural change, brought on by a radical change in thought: after over 2,000 years of monarchical rule, the Chinese people stopped believing in the emperor. These forty years saw the collapse of Confucian political orthodoxy and the struggle among competing definitions of modern citizenship and the state. What made it possible to suddenly imagine a world without the emperor?After Empire traces the for...

This fully illustrated book tells the story of China through 96 short biographies. Expert authors have drawn on a huge range of sources to assemble information about the widest possible range of individuals from all periods and parts of China, from an early warrior lady of the 13th century BC, Fu Hao, to the late-20th-century Communist leader Deng Xiaoping. We see the range of Chinese cultural and scientific achievements, as well as its military conquests, wars, rebellions and political an...

Translations of the Yi jing into western languages have been biased towards the yili ('meaning and pattern') tradition, whereas studies of the xiangshu ('image and number') tradition - which takes as its point of departure the imagery and numerology associated with divination and its hexagrams, trigrams, lines, and related charts and diagrams - has remained relatively unexplored. This major new reference work is organised as a Chinese-English encyclopedia, arrang...

The Ming dynasty (1368-1644), a period of commercial expansion and cultural innovation, fashioned the relationship between state and society in Chinese history. This unique collection of reworked and heavily illustrated essays, by one of the leading scholars of Chinese history, re-examines this relationship. It argues that, contrary to previous scholarship, it was radical responses within society that led to a 'constitution', not periods of fluctuation within the dynasty itself. Brook's ou...