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'Golden Lotus was without precedent in China and was not to be equaled in sophistication…for another two centuries.'--Robert Hegel, Scholar of Chinese literature

Opportunity in Crisis explores the history of late Qing Cantonese migration along the West River basin during war and reconstruction and the impact of those developments on the relationship between state and local elites on the Guangxi frontier. By situating Cantonese upriver and overseas migration within the same framework, Steven Miles reconceives the late Qing as an age of Cantonese diasporic expansion rather than one of state decline. The book opens with crisis: rising levels of violence targeting Cantonese riverine commerce, much of it fomented by a geographically mobile Cantonese underclass. Miles then narrates the ensuing history of a Cantonese rebel regime established in Guangxi in the wake of the Taiping uprising. Subsequent chapters discuss opportunities created by this crisis and its aftermath and demonstrate important continuities and changes across the mid-century divide. With the reassertion of Qing control, Cantonese commercial networks in Guangxi expanded dramatically and became an increasingly important source of state revenue. Through its reliance on Hunanese and Cantonese to reconquer Guangxi, the Qing state allowed these diasporic cohorts more flexibility in colonizing the provincial administration and examination apparatus, helping to recreate a single polity on the eve of China's transition from empire to nation-state.

Examining Britain's imperial outposts in 1920s East Asia, this book explores the changes and challenges affecting the Royal Navy's third largest fleet, the China Station, as its crews fought to hold back the changing tides of fortune.Bridging the gap between high level naval strategy and everyday imperial culture, Heaslip highlights the importance of the China Station to the British imperial system, foreign policy and East Asian geopolitics, while also revealing the lived experiences of these imperial outposts. Following their immersion into a new world and the challenges they encountered along the way, it considers how its naval officers were perceived by the Chinese populations of the ports they visited, how the two communities interacted and what this meant at a time of'peace'. Against the changing nature of Britain's informal empire in the 1920s, Gunboats, Empire and the China Station highlights the complex nature of naval operations in-between major conflicts, and calls into question how peaceful this peacetime truly was.

The Pitfalls of Piety for Married Women shows how problematic the practice of Buddhist piety could be in late imperial China. Two thematically related'precious scrolls'(baojuan) from the Ming dynasty, The Precious Scroll of the Red Gauze and The Precious Scroll of the Handkerchief, illustrate the difficulties faced by women whose religious devotion conflicted with the demands of marriage and motherhood.These two previously untranslated texts tell the stories of married women whose piety causes them to be separated from their husbands and children. While these women labor far away, their children are cruelly abused by murderous stepmothers. Following many adventures, the families are reunited by divine intervention and the evil stepmothers get their just deserts. While the texts in The Pitfalls of Piety for Married Women praise Buddhist piety, they also reveal many problems concerning married women and mothers.Wilt L. Idema's translations are preceded by an introduction that places these scrolls in the context of Ming dynasty performative literature, vernacular literature, and popular religion. Set in a milieu of rich merchants, the texts provide a unique window to family life of the time, enriching our understanding of gender during the Ming dynasty. These popular baojuan offer rare insights into lay religion and family dynamics of the Ming dynasty, and their original theme and form enrich our understanding of the various methods of storytelling that were practiced at the time.

Enigmatic, Eminence grise, the'power behind the throne'– these phrases sum up Zhou Enlai's long and varied, but always pivotal, political career in the Chinese Communist Party from the 1920s to 1970s. Born in 1898, Zhou witnessed several of the most important events in China's modern history and was a close associate of both the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek and communist leader Mao Zedong, whom he served under as China's first premier from 1949 until 1976. Zhou was also a major ally of Deng Xiaoping – a source, for example, of major influence on his'Four Modernizations'in agriculture, industry, science and technology, and the military. He was thus the prime architect of China's drive towards superpower status and one of the key determinants of China's central role in the modern world. Zhou does not conform readily to any of the stereotypes of communist leaders, Chinese or otherwise. Cultivated and urbane, he was a sympathetic and intellectual character, who was well-liked by non-communists, foreigners and his staff. He was one of the most complex figures in the politics of contemporary China, and certainly one of the most interesting, although his influence was never all that obvious. In this book, Michael Dillon restores him to his rightful place in history and analyses the role of a man who was'a genuine statesman rather than just a political operator'.

During the first period of globalization medical ideas and practices originating in China became entangled in the medical activities of other places, sometimes at long distances. They produced effects through processes of alteration once known as translatio, meaning movements in place, status, and meaning. The contributors to this volume examine occasions when intermediaries responded creatively to aspects of Chinese medicine, whether by trying to pass them on or to draw on them in furtherance of their own interests. Practitioners in Japan, at the imperial court, and in early and late Enlightenment Europe therefore responded to translations creatively, sometimes attempting to build bridges of understanding that often collapsed but left innovation in their wake. Contributors are Marta Hanson, Gianna Pomata, Beatriz Puente-Ballesteros, Wei Yu Wayne Tan, Margaret Garber, Daniel Trambaiolo, and Motoichi Terada. Winner of the J. Worth Estes Prize 2021 awarded by the American Association for the History of Medicine: Beatriz Puentes-Ballesteros, “Chocolate in China: Interweaving cultural histories of an imperfectly connected world,” in Harold Cook (ed.), Translation at Word: Chinese Medicine in the First Global Age (Leiden, Boston: Brill | Rodopi, 2020).

'A learned, wise, wonderfully written single volume history of a civilisation that I knew I should know more about'Tom Holland'Masterful and engrossing...well-paced, eminently readable and well-timed. A must-read for those who want – and need – to know about the China of yesterday, today and tomorrow'Peter FrankopanChina's story is extraordinarily rich and dramatic. Now Michael Wood, one of the UK's pre-eminent historians, brings it all together in a major new one-volume history of China that is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand its burgeoning role in our world today. China is the oldest living civilisation on earth, but its history is still surprisingly little known in the wider world. Michael Wood's sparkling narrative, which mingles the grand sweep with local and personal stories, woven together with the author's own travel journals, is an enthralling account of China's 4000-year-old tradition, taking in life stationed on the Great Wall or inside the Forbidden City. The story is enriched with the latest archaeological and documentary discoveries; correspondence and court cases going back to the Qin and Han dynasties; family letters from soldiers in the real-life Terracotta Army; stories from Silk Road merchants and Buddhist travellers, along with memoirs and diaries of emperors, poets and peasants. In the modern era, the book is full of new insights, with the electrifying manifestos of the feminist revolutionaries Qiu Jin and He Zhen, extraordinary eye-witness accounts of the Japanese invasion, the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution under Chairman Mao, and fascinating newly published sources for the great turning points in China's modern history, including the Tiananmen Square crisis of 1989, and the new order of President Xi Jinping. A compelling portrait of a single civilisation over an immense period of time, the book is full of intimate detail and colourful voices, taking us from the desolate Mongolian steppes to the ultra-modern world of Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. It also asks what were the forces that have kept China together for so long? Why was China overtaken by the west after the 18th century? What lies behind China's extraordinary rise today? The Story of China tells a thrilling story of intense drama, fabulous creativity and deep humanity; a portrait of a country that will be of the greatest importance to the world in the twenty-first century.

William Nelson Lovatt in Late Qing China: War, Maritime Customs, and Treaty Ports,1860-1904 looks at the late Qing dynasty through the eyes of a British-American who spent most of his adult life in China in the late nineteenth century, fighting in four wars, serving in its maritime customs service, and living in eleven different treaty ports. It is based on the newly-discovered journals, correspondence, and photographs of William Nelson Lovatt (1838-1904), who first arrived in China in 1860 as a sergeant in the British army to fight in the Second Opium War, and who then proceeded to fight against the Taiping in Shanghai, against the Nian in Tianjin, and finally against the Japanese in Taiwan, providing an inside look at those four conflicts. Joining the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service in 1863 under Inspector-General Sir Robert Hart, Lovatt provides a rare insider look at the operation of Hart and the Maritime Customs Service for during the four decades he served. Because he was based in treaty ports, he also provides a new look at those enclaves, their institutions, and their inhabitants – Chinese, missionaries, and fellow customs officials. Fluent in Chinese, his frequent travels outside the treaty ports gave him rare access to Chinese society available to few others. This volume opens up a new window on China during the final decades of the Qing dynasty.

'In 1817 a Cantonese scholar was mocked in Beijing as surprisingly learned for someone from the boondocks; in 1855 another Cantonese scholar boasted of the flourishing of literati culture in his home region. Not without reason, the second man pointed to the Xuehaitang (Sea of Learning Hall) as the main factor in the upsurge of learning in the Guangzhou area. Founded in the 1820s by the eminent scholar-official Ruan Yuan, the Xuehaitang was indeed one of the premier academies of the nineteenth century. The celebratory discourse that portrayed the Xuehaitang as having radically altered literati culture in Guangzhou also legitimated the academy's place in Guangzhou and Guangzhou's place as a cultural center in the Qing empire. This study asks: Who constructed this discourse and why? And why did some Cantonese elites find this discourse compelling while others did not? To answer these questions, Steven Miles looks beyond intellectual history to local social and cultural history. Arguing that the academy did not exist in a scholarly vacuum, Miles contends that its location in the city of Guangzhou and the Pearl River Delta embedded it in social settings and networks that determined who utilized its resources and who celebrated its successes and values.'

As part of the growing scholarship on family and empire, this study examines Britain's presence in China through the lens of one family, arguing that, as the physical embodiment of the imperial project, it provided a social and cultural mechanism for mediating Britain's imperial power, authority and presence, and forging connections and networks throughout the expanding British world. Drawing on public and private papers, it breaks significant new ground in its development of those themes.

This book is in the Cambria Sinophone World Series, headed by Victor Mair (University of Pennsylvania).This book explores a new and innovative topic—the relationship between geographical advancements in the Mid-Tang period (790s to 820s) and spatial imaginaries in contemporaneous literature. Historically and politically, the Mid-Tang period is generally considered to be a period of imperial reconstruction following the chaos of the An Lushan Rebellion (755–763), a rebellion that had a profound impact not only on the Tang empire but also on all of Chinese history. On the one hand, this era witnessed a heightened geographical awareness and a rapid development and accumulation of geographical knowledge, as was manifested in the governmental production of local map-guides and the invention of some monumental world maps. On the other hand, Mid-Tang literature represents one of the peaks of traditional Chinese literature and is known for its diversity of genres and innovative and imaginative engagement with space. For the first time in Tang scholarship, this study identifies the epistemological and aesthetic interplay between geography and literature in medieval China and investigates how this thus-far neglected interplay shaped the Mid-Tang literary imagination. This interdisciplinary investigation uncovers a rich cultural history of human exploration of the world on both fronts and provides a fresh reading of some of the most famous works of Tang literature, for example Li He's poetry and Liu Zongyuan's landscape essays. This study reveals some unique phenomena in genre development and individual creation in Mid-Tang literature and deepens our understanding of the inner workings and internal drive of traditional Chinese literature in general. This book expands and deepens the exploration of the interactions between literature and geography. Literary geography has been an active interdisciplinary field ever since the 1970s. In the early years as the field was taking shape, it was widely criticized for its instrumentalization of literary texts as unproblematic sources for empirical geographical study. In recent years, however, literary scholars have become increasingly interested in treating literary texts as another form of geography, or spatial organization, as many key literary elements, such as setting and milieu in fiction and imagery arrangement in poetry, involve spatial understanding on a fundamental level. Spatial Imaginaries in Mid-Tang China will be a welcome resource for scholars and students in Chinese literature, historical geography, cultural history, and art history.

Eminent Chinese of the Qing Period was first developed under the auspices of the US Library of Congress during World War II. This much-loved work, edited by Arthur W. Hummel Sr., was meticulously compiled and unique in its scope, and quickly became the standard biographical reference for the Qing dynasty, which lasted from 1644 to 1911/2. Amongst the contributors are John King Fairbank, Têng Ssû-yü, L. Carrington Goodrich, C. Martin Wilbur, Fêng Chia-shêng, Knight Biggerstaff, and Nancy Lee Swann. The 2018 Berkshire edition contains the original eight hundred biographical sketches as well as the original front and back matter, including the preface by Hu Shih, a scholar who had been China's ambassador to the United States. An introduction by Pamela Crossley places this classic work in historical context, and discusses its origins, authors and editors, themes, style, and contemporary relevance. Chinese names in English have been converted to the pinyin transcription system (changing the book's title from Ch'ing to Qing), but the traditional Chinese characters have been retained. Additional materials added by Berkshire include a general bibliography, a Wade-Giles to pinyin conversion table, and a list of Qing dynasty emperors. Arthur W. Hummel Sr. (1884–1975) was a missionary, sinologist, and the first director of the Orientalia Division at the Library of Congress. Pamela Crossley is a professor at Dartmouth College and a specialist on the Qing empire and modern Chinese history, as well as the software author and scholarly editor of the ECCP Reader, a digital companion to the original Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period.

Traditional narratives of capitalist change often rely on the myth of the willful entrepreneur from the global North who transforms the economy and delivers modernity—for good or ill—to the rest of the world. With Cigarettes, Inc., Nan Enstad upends this story, revealing the myriad cross-cultural encounters that produced corporate life before World War II. In this startling account of innovation and expansion, Enstad uncovers a corporate network rooted in Jim Crow segregation that stretched between the United States and China and beyond. Cigarettes, Inc. teems with a global cast—from Egyptian, American, and Chinese entrepreneurs to a multiracial set of farmers, merchants, factory workers, marketers, and even baseball players, jazz musicians, and sex workers. Through their stories, Cigarettes, Inc. accounts for the cigarette's spectacular rise in popularity and in the process offers nothing less than a sweeping reinterpretation of corporate power itself.

Tracing journeys of Cantonese migrants along the West River and its tributaries, this book describes the circulation of people through one of the world's great river systems between the late sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Steven B. Miles examines the relationship between diaspora and empire in an upriver frontier, and the role of migration in sustaining families and lineages in the homeland of what would become a global diaspora. Based on archival research and multisite fieldwork, this innovative history of mobility explores a set of diasporic practices ranging from the manipulation of household registration requirements to the maintenance of split families. Many of the institutions and practices that facilitated overseas migration were not adaptations of tradition to transnational modernity; rather, they emerged in the early modern era within the context of riverine migration. Likewise, the extension and consolidation of empire required not only unidirectional frontier settlement and sedentarization of indigenous populations. It was also responsible for the regular circulation between homeland and frontier of people who drove imperial expansion—even while turning imperial aims toward their own purposes of socioeconomic advancement.

“[This] thoughtful, engaging, and well-written analysis helps to separate fact from myth when it comes to understanding the nature of Chinese nationalism.” —New York Review of BooksChina's new nationalism, Robert Bickers shows, is rooted not in its present power but in shameful memories of its former weaknesses. Invaded, humiliated, and looted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by foreign powers, China looks out at the twenty-first century through the lens of the past. History matters deeply to Beijing's current rulers, and Out of China explains why.Bickers tracks the long, often agonizing process by which the Chinese regained control of their own country. He describes the the myriad means?through armed threats, technology, and legal chicanery?by which China was kept subservient until, gradually, it emerged from Western control. This plural and partial subjugation of China is a story that involves not only European powers and Japan but also the United States.The story of the foreign presence in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is too important to be left in the hands of the Chinese party-state and its approved script. Out of China is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand what shapes China's view of the world in the twenty-first century.“Teeming with nuances while assailing the Communist party's nationalistic narrative, Bickers'book is a reminder of the importance of uncovering the past's messy, contradictory truths.” –Financial Times “[A] superb history of foreign power in China.” —Times Literary Supplement“Robert Bickers is a pre-eminent chronicler of China... a great story told with splashes of color and sharp wit.” —Literary Review“An all-embracing and fascinating tale.” —Choice

Written by one of Japan'most popular modern authors, this is a lively, readable, and immensely entertaining fictional portrayal of one of the epochal events of the nineteenth century.

It is nearing the end of the 2nd Century, and Han Dynasty China is beset by strife. Numerous warlords, tribal uprisings, bandit armies and peasant rebellions are devastating the already famine-ridden nation, and the young Emperor Xian can only watch from his court in Chang'an, where the power is held by warlord-regents Li Jue and Guo Si. The men that should be fighting to restore the Han - the wealthy Yuan Shao, so-called “Hero of Chaos” Cao Cao and disinherited Han scion Liu Bei - are too busy with their own problems, and none are worse than the ambitious Yuan Shu - who covets his brother Shao's power and more besides - and Lü Bu, foster son of vanquished tyrant Dong Zhuo and a force of chaos unlike any other. The Han's fate is uncertain as power shifts from Chang'an to Xuchang and the factions dwindle; a famous battle at Guandu is all that then stands between ambitious men and the road to the legendary “Three Kingdoms” era.

“[An] evocative portrait” of one of the most influential and enigmatic American art dealers of the 1960s (Barbara Rose, The New York Times).In 1959, Richard Bellamy was a witty, poetry-loving beatnik on the fringe of the New York art world. By 1965, he was representing Mark di Suvero, had been the first to show Andy Warhol's pop art, and had introduced the new genre of installation art. An eccentric art dealer and founder of the Green Gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street, Bellamy helped discover many of the innovative successors to the abstract expressionists, including Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Walter de Maria, and many others. But, uninterested in anything more than showing the artists he loved, Bellamy slowly slid into obscurity while fellow dealers such as Leo Castelli and Sidney Janis capitalized on the stars he helped find.Based on decades of research and on hundreds of interviews with Bellamy's artists, friends, colleagues, and lovers, Judith E. Stein's Eye of the Sixties rescues the legacy of the elusive art dealer and tells the story of a counterculture that became the mainstream. Ranging from the Beat orbits of Provincetown to white-glove events like Guggenheim's opening gala, from Norman Mailer's parties to historic downtown Happenings, Richard Bellamy's story is a remarkable window on the art of the twentieth century and the making of a generation's aesthetic.“[Judith E. Stein's] engrossing, impressively researched, consistently readable, and often entertaining tale restores a crucial figure to his rightful place in the annals of postwar American art.” —Lilly Wei, Art in America“By using [Belamy's] unlikely ascent as a prism, Ms. Stein brings to vibrant life a corner of the culture that was as outrageous as it was visually revolutionary.” —Ann Landi, The Wall Street Journal“A man of shrewd and impeccable taste, Bellamy's role in promoting the often misunderstood art of abstract expressionism, pop, and minimalism was profound. This is an endearing and illuminating work of biography. A shadowy figure of the 1960s art world is gloriously revealed.” —Kirkus Reviews