Treatises of the Supervisor and Guardian of the Cinnamon Sea PDF Download

Author: Fan Chengda
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295802065
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Fan Chengda (1126-1193) was a high-ranking Chinese government official in Guangxi, an experienced traveler, a keen observer, and a gifted writer. His observations on a wide range of subjects are always interesting and revealing, and constitute an important contribution to the literature on Song dynasty China’s frontier peoples. Originally written in direct, unadorned, and allusion-free classical Chinese prose, the complete and annotated English translation of Treatises of the Supervisor and Guardian of the Cinnamon Sea (Guihai yuheng zhi) captures its charm and significance.

Author: Tana Li
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009237667
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 670

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Book Description
Despite its 3,000 kilometre coastline, few people see Vietnam as a maritime country. Here Li Tana presents a powerful new argument about Vietnamese history: that key political changes resulted from the impact, economic and otherwise, of the sea. This is a finely layered account covering the two millennia before colonisation that radically restructures how we understand the role of the maritime and trans-regional in Vietnam's early history. Drawing on exhaustive research of Chinese, Vietnamese and Japanese sources, Li reveals that it is only when viewed against the background of the sea that Vietnam's past can be properly understood. In contrast to traditional perceptions of an inward-looking society dominated by Chinese cultural influence, Vietnam was shaped by dynamic littoral economic and cultural contact.

Author: Zheng Jinsheng
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520291972
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 796

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Book Description
The Ben cao gang mu, compiled in the second half of the sixteenth century by a team led by the physician Li Shizhen (1518–1593) on the basis of previously published books and contemporary knowledge, is the largest encyclopedia of natural history in a long tradition of Chinese materia medica works. Its description of almost 1,900 pharmaceutically used natural and man-made substances marks the apex of the development of premodern Chinese pharmaceutical knowledge. The Ben cao gang mu dictionary offers access to this impressive work of 1,600,000 characters. This third book in a three-volume series offers detailed biographical data on all identifiable authors, patients, witnesses of therapies, transmitters of recipes, and further persons mentioned in the Ben cao gang mu and provides bibliographical data on all textual sources resorted to and quoted by Li Shizhen and his collaborators.

Author: James A. Anderson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004282483
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
China's Encounters on the South and Southwest. Reforging the Fiery Frontier Over Two Millennia describes the southern periphery of China and the many local and state agents acting first to shift and then to shape this territory over two thousand years, mainly by land but now by sea.

Author: Angela Schottenhammer
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004523723
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
The book investigates China’s relations to the outside world between ca. 100 BCE and 1800 CE. In contrast to most histories of the Silk Roads, the focus of this book clearly lies on the maritime Silk Road and on the period between Tang and high Qing, selecting aspects that have so far been neglected in research on the history of China’s relations with the outside world. The author examines, for example, issue of 'imperialism' in imperial China, the specific role of fanbing 蕃兵 (frontier tribal troops) during Song times, the interrelationship between maritime commerce, military expansion, and environmental factors during the Yuan, the question of whether or not early Ming China can be considered a (proto-)colonialist country, the role force and violence played during the Zheng He expeditions, and the significance the Asia-Pacific world possessed for late Ming and early Qing rulers.

Author: Kurt Caswell
Publisher: Trinity University Press
ISBN: 1595342621
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Writer, teacher, and adventurer Kurt Caswell has spent his adult life canoeing, hiking, and pedaling his way toward a deeper understanding of our vast and varied world. Getting to Grey Owl: A Man's Journey across Four Continents chronicles over twenty years of Caswell’s travels as he buys a rug in Morocco, rides a riverboat in China, attends a bullfight in Spain, climbs four mountains in the United Kingdom, and backpacks a challenging route through Iceland’s wild Hornstrandir Peninsula. Writing in the tradition of such visionary nomads as Hermann Hesse, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux, Pico Iyer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, Caswell travels through wild and urban landscapes, as well as philosophical and ideological vistas, championing the pleasures of a wandering life. Far from the trappings of the everyday, he explores a range of ideas: the meaning of roads and pathways, the story of Cain and Abel, nomadic life and the evolution of the human animal, the role of agriculture in the making of the modern world, and the fragility of love.

Author: Alain Touwaide
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350259284
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
A Cultural History of Plants in the Post-Classical Era covers the period from 500 to 1400, ranging across northern and central Europe to the Mediterranean, and from the Byzantine and Arabic Empires to the Persian World, India, and China. This was an age of empires and fluctuating borders, presenting a changing mosaic of environments, populations, and cultural practices. Many of the ancient uses and meanings of plants were preserved, but these were overlaid with new developments in agriculture, landscapes, medicine, eating habits, and art. The six-volume set of the Cultural History of Plants presents the first comprehensive history of the uses and meanings of plants from prehistory to today. The themes covered in each volume are plants as staple foods; plants as luxury foods; trade and exploration; plant technology and science; plants and medicine; plants in culture; plants as natural ornaments; the representation of plants. Alain Touwaide is Scientific Director at the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions, Washington, D.C., USA. A Cultural History of Plants in the Post-Classical Era is the second volume in the six-volume set, A Cultural History of Plants, also available online as part of Bloomsbury Cultural History, a fully-searchable digital library (see www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com). General Editors: Annette Giesecke, University of Delaware, USA, and David Mabberley, University of Oxford, UK.

Author: Victor H Mair
Publisher: Flipside Digital Content Company Inc.
ISBN: 9814620556
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
At a time when China-Southeast Asia relationships are undergoing profound changes, it is pleasing to have a volume which examines the interactions between China and the polities and societies to the south through time. With multiple aims of exploring the relations between northern Chinese cultures and those of the south, examining the cultural plurality of areas which are today parts of Southern China, and illuminating the relations between Sinitic and non-Sinitic societies, the volume is broad in concept and content. Within these extensive rubrics, this edited collection further interrogates the nature of Asian polities and their historiography, the constitution of Chineseness, imperial China's southern expansions, cultural hybridity, economic relations, regional systems and ethnic interactions across East Asia. The editors Victor H. Mair and Liam C. Kelley are to be congratulated for bringing together such a wealth of contributions offering nascent interpretations and broad overviews, set within the overarching historical and contemporary contexts provided through Wang Gungwu's introduction.- Dr Geoffrey Wade, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University

Author: Shuchen Xiang
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691242720
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
A provocative defense of a forgotten Chinese approach to identity and difference Historically, the Western encounter with difference has been catastrophic: the extermination and displacement of aboriginal populations, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism. China, however, took a different historical path. In Chinese Cosmopolitanism, Shuchen Xiang argues that the Chinese cultural tradition was, from its formative beginnings and throughout its imperial history, a cosmopolitan melting pot that synthesized the different cultures that came into its orbit. Unlike the West, which cast its collisions with different cultures in Manichean terms of the ontologically irreconcilable difference between civilization and barbarism, China was a dynamic identity created out of difference. The reasons for this, Xiang argues, are philosophical: Chinese philosophy has the conceptual resources for providing alternative ways to understand pluralism. Xiang explains that “Chinese” identity is not what the West understands as a racial identity; it is not a group of people related by common descent or heredity but rather a hybrid of coalescing cultures. To use the Western discourse of race to frame the Chinese view of non-Chinese, she argues, is a category error. Xiang shows that China was both internally cosmopolitan, embracing distinct peoples into a common identity, and externally cosmopolitan, having knowledge of faraway lands without an ideological need to subjugate them. Contrasting the Chinese understanding of efficacy—described as “harmony”—with the Western understanding of order, she argues that the Chinese sought to gain influence over others by having them spontaneously accept the virtue of one’s position. These ideas from Chinese philosophy, she contends, offer a new way to understand today’s multipolar world and can make a valuable contribution to contemporary discussions in the critical philosophy of race.

Author: Pu Songling
Publisher: Jain Publishing Company
ISBN: 0895810514
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
The weird and whimsical short stories in Strange Tales from Liaozhai show their author, Pu Songling (1640-1715), to be both an explorer of the macabre, like Edgar Allan Poe, and a moralist, like Aesop. In this first complete translation of the collection's 494 stories into English, readers will encounter supernatural creatures, natural disasters, magical aspects of Buddhist and Daoist spirituality, and a wide range of Chinese folklore. Annotations are provided to clarify unfamiliar references or cultural allusions, and introductory essays have been included to explain facets of Pu Songling's work and to provide context for some of the unique qualities of his uncanny tales. This is the sixth of 6 volumes.