Author: Mark ElvinPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 458
Book Description
From a Chinese City
Author: Gontran de PoncinsPublisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 9781879434004
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268
Book Description
A French traveler describes the spirit of ancient China as it is manifested in Cholon, a city in South Vietnam. Forty-two "on-the-spot" halftone drawings.
The Chinese City
Author: Weiping WuPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415575753
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 314
Book Description
This text is anchored in the spatial sciences to offer a comprehensive survey of the evolving urban landscape in China. It is divided into four parts with 13 chapters that can be read together or as stand alone material.
Remaking the Chinese City
Author: Joseph W. EsherickPublisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824825188
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294
Book Description
In China today skyscrapers tower over ancient temples, freeways deliver lines of cars and tour buses to imperial palaces, cinema houses compete with old theaters featuring Peking Opera. The disparity evidenced in the contemporary Chinese cityscape can be traced to the early decades of the twentieth century, when government elites sought to transform cities into a new world that would be at once modern and distinctly Chinese. Remaking the Chinese City aims to capture the full diversity of recent Chinese urbanism by examining the modernist transformations of China's cities in the first half of the twentieth century. Collecting in one place some of the most interesting and exciting new work on Chinese urban history, this volume presents thirteen essays discussing ten Chinese cities: the commercial and industrial center of Shanghai; the old capital, Beijing; the southern coastal city of Canton; the interior's Chengdu; the tourist city of Hangzhou; the utopian "New Capital" built in Manchuria during the Japanese occupation; the treaty port of Tianjin; the Nationalists' capital in Nanjing; and temporary wartime capitals of Wuhan and Chongqing. Unlike past treatments of early twentieth-century China, which characterize the period as one of failure and decay, the contributors to this volume describe an exciting world in constant and fundamental change. During this time, the Chinese city was remade to accommodate parks and police, paved roads and public spaces. Rickshaws, trolleys, and buses allowed the growth of new downtowns. Department stores, theaters, newspapers, and modern advertising nourished a new urban identity. Sanitary regulations and traffic laws were enforced, and modern media and transport permitted unprecedented freedoms. Yet despite their fondness for things Western and modern, early urban planners envisioned cities that would lead the Chinese nation and preserve Chinese tradition. The very desire for modernity led to the construction of a visible and accessible national past and the imagining of a distinctive national future. In their investigation of the national capitals of the period, the essays show how cities were reshaped to represent and serve the nation. To promote tourism, traditions were invented and recycled for the pleasure and edification of new middle-class and foreign consumers of culture. Abundantly illustrated with maps and photographs, Remaking the Chinese City presents the best and most current scholarship on modern Chinese cities. Its thoroughness and detailed scholarship will appeal to the specialist, while its clarity and scope will engage the general reader. Contributors: Michael Tsin on Canton, Ruth Rogaski and Brett Sheehan on Tianjin, David Buck on Changchun, Kristin Stapleton on Chengdu, Liping Wang on Hangzhou, Madeleine Dong on Beijing, Charles Musgrove on Nanjing, Stephen MacKinnon on Wuhan, Lee MacIsaac on Chongqing, and Jeffrey Wasserstrom and David Strand with concluding essays.
Understanding the Chinese City
Author: Li ShiqiaoPublisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1473905397
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Book Description
"One thing is clear: in marginalising Chinese tradition and falling short of wholesale importation of Western cultural and political ideals and institutions, Chinese cities have become, in one sense, the scrapyard of half-hearted emulations and acts of resistance, appearing to be neither here nor there...” - Li Shiqiao, writing in the South China Morning Post This book teaches us to read the contemporary Chinese city. Li Shiqiao deftly crafts a new theory of the Chinese city and the dynamics of urbanization by: examining how the Chinese city has been shaped by the figuration of the writing system analyzing the continuing importance of the family and its barriers of protection against real and imagined dangers exploring the meanings of labour, and the resultant numerical and financial hierarchies demonstrating how actual structures bring into visual being the conceptions of numerical distributions, safety networks, and aesthetic orders. Understanding the Chinese City elegantly traces a thread between ancient Chinese city formations and current urban organizations, revealing hidden continuities that show how instrumental the past has been in forming the present. It contextualizes Chinese urban experiences in relation to familiar intellectual landmarks. Rather than becoming obstacles to change, ancient practices have become effective strategies of adaptation under radically new terms.
The Chinese City in Space and Time
Author: Yinong XuPublisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824820763
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 520
Book Description
Drawing on a wealth of primary materials detailing the city's history, customs, and urban construction as well as on recent work in Chinese history, culture, and religion, Yinong Xu examines characteristics of building and transformation in pre-modern Suzhou, characteristics that, while particular to the city's own historical development, reflect or were determined by factors representative of China's urban history in general.".
The Chinese City Between Two Worlds
Author: Mark ElvinThe Making of a Chinese City
Author: Søren ClausenPublisher: M.E. Sharpe
ISBN: 9781563244766
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284
Book Description
A study of the history and historiography of the Chinese city of Harbin, which has been ruled by Russia, Chinese warlords, Japan, the Soviet Union, and by the Chinese Communists. Chapters deal with the period before the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway, the era of Russian dominance, the Japanese occupation, and the years since the Communist takeover in 1946, and discuss local writings. Includes translations of articles by Chinese historians, and discusses the historiographical framework for local history writing. Paper edition (unseen), $22.50. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City
Author: Paul WheatleyPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351477900
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378
Book Description
These two volumes elucidate the manner in which there emerged, on the North China plain, hierarchically structured, functionally specialized social institutions organized on a political and territorial basis during the second millennium b.c. They describe the way in which, during subsequent centuries, these institutes were diffused through much of the rest of North and Central China. Author Paul Wheatley equates the emergence of the ceremonial center, as evidenced in Shang China, with a functional and developmental stage in urban genesis, and substantiates his argument with comparative evidence from the Americas, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Southeast Asia, the Mediterranean, and the Yoruba territories. The Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City seeks in small measure to help redress the current imbalance between our knowledge of the contemporary, Western-style city on the one hand, and of the urbanism characteristic of the traditional world on the other. Those aspects of urban theory which have been derived predominantly from the investigation of Western urbanism, are tested against, rather than applied to ancient China. The Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City examines the cosmological symbolism of the Chinese city, constructed as a world unto itself. It suggests, with a wealth of argument and evidence, that this cosmo-magical role underpinned the functional unity of the city everywhere, until new bases for urban life began to develop in the Hellenistic world. Whereas the majority of previous investigations into the nature of the Chinese city have been undertaken from the standpoint of elites, The Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City has adopted a point of view closer to that of the social scientist than the geographer.
The Habitable City in China
Author: Toby LincolnPublisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137554711
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231
Book Description
This book offers a new perspective on Chinese urban history by exploring cities as habitable spaces. China, the world’s most populous nation, is now its newest urban society, and the pace of this unprecedented historical transformation has increased in recent decades. The contributors to this book conceptualise cities as first providing the necessities of life, and then becoming places in which the quality of life can be improved. They focus on how cities have been made secure during times of instability, how their inhabitants have consumed everything from the simplest of foods to the most expensive luxuries, and how they have been planned as ideal spaces. Drawing examples from across the country, this book offers comparisons between different cities, highlights continuities across time and space—and in doing so may provide solutions to some of the problems that continue to affect Chinese cities today.
Globalization and the Chinese City
Author: Fulong WuPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134263872
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Book Description
Introducing readers to the far-reaching global orientation that is now taking place in urban China, an international team of contributors examine the impact of globalization on Chinese cities, including the economic, cultural and political impact.