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The research on display here is sober and systematic, introducing in detail what I Punch i was, how it was run, and how China was depicted in its "large cut" cartoons; from what I have seen, a study of its smaller scale imagery would simply reinforce the conclusions established. But it is possible to go further: this book deserves a readership far beyond the academic world of studying China; read this book, and one will readily see the Chinese phrase "A Century of Humiliation" in a completely new light. [Extracted from the article]

Robert Morrison (1782–1834), the first Protestant missionary to China, was responsible for the completion of the earliest Chinese-English Dictionary in 1814. Though this work would not have reached publication without the help of Chinese assistants, and of the printer P. P. Thoms (1790–1855), even so Morrison's scholarly achievements in this and other aspects of Chinese studies were prodigious. This survey of recent research makes clear the continuing value of his writings to contemporary scholars, and also suggests that he was not simply more seriously engaged in attempting to understand China than his contemporaries but also more enlightened than a good number of his successors in missionary work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Comparative writing about the history of science and technology in different cultures tends to assume that differences in the ways in which these cultures write their histories are not important. But this is unlikely to be the case. The comparative lack of historical writing about printing in China by European standards should not in itself lead us to conclude that print only played a minor role there, any more than the tendency to downplay the importance of paper among historians of the European book means that its use in Europe was less significant than in other cultures. That in China the relative balance of the historical record is the opposite of the one that we tend to assume on the basis of the European experience is demonstrated here by contrasting the dearth of information about early printing with the commemoration even of relatively marginal cultural figures through the traditional Chinese historiography of paper making. But only tentative suggestions can be made as to why these differences in historical writing may have occurred. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the imperial history of superstition and its others under the Han dynasty in China. It is implied that the contemporary East Asian term "superstition" in Chinese would appear to be a comparatively recent coinage, and may well reflect a Christian analysis of the religious situation. More of Chinese history that did function in much the same way as superstition and its equivalents in European languages have always done as a system of labelling that denigrated certain forms of religious activity as inferior. Moreover, it emphasized that most prominent of the terms used in Chinese was the compound yinsi, which was often translated as licentious cult or licentious sacrifices.

Traces the way in which the English-language world sustained a description of religion in China. Persistence of a particular paradigm in the understanding of Chinese religion; Jesuit interpretation of Chinese religion in the writings of Matteo Ricci; Description of the three sects in China.