Marc S. Abramson's rich portrait of this complex, multiethnic empire draws on political writings, religious texts, and other cultural artifacts, as well as comparative examples from other empires and frontiers. Abramson argues that various constituencies, ranging from Confucian elites to Buddhist monks to "barbarian" generals, sought to define ethnic boundaries for various reasons but often in part out of discomfort with the ambiguity of their own ethnic and cultural identity. The Tang court, meanwhile, alternately sought to absorb some alien populations to preserve the empire's integrity while seeking to preserve the ethnic distinctiveness of other groups whose particular skills it valued. Abramson demonstrates how the Tang era marked a key shift in definitions of China and the Chinese people, a shift that ultimately laid the foundation for the emergence of the modern Chinese nation. Item # 34337 ISBN 9780812240528 (University of Pennsylvania Press) Price: $55.00

The author shows that in China it is possible to discard terms such as ‘magic’, which imply that acts directed to spirits operate on a different basis from acts in ordinary life. She also challenges claims in anthropology that, since they seem arbitrary and the actions of participants in them highly predictable, rituals support established authority. Her book will be of interest not only to specialists in Chinese studies, but to social anthropologists and others interested in the link between ritual and political processes. Item # 35670 ISBN 0521236908 (Cambridge University Press) Price: $55.00

Often misunderstood by his peers Johnston knew how to capture a child's imagination and quickly gained the trust and friendship of the young Chinese Emperor. Johnston was the only foreigner working in the Forbidden City, and Puyi appointed him Mandarin of the highest rank. This is the first complete biography of the explorer, writer, tutor and advisor to the last Emperor of China. Item # 24003 ISBN 1901663493 (National Museums of Scotland (NMS) Publishing) Price: $9.95

Traditional interpretations of the rebellion there have emphasized the political threat posed by the Muslim Yunnanese, but no prior study has sought to understand the insurrection in its broader muti-ethnic borderland context. At its core, the book delineates the escalating government support of premeditated massacres of the Hui by Han Chinese and offers the first in-depth examination of the seventeen-year-long rule of the Dali Sultanate. Item # 32333 ISBN 0804751595 (Stanford University Press) Price: $65.00

Geremie Barmé peels away the veneer of power, secrecy, inscrutability, and passions of imperial China, to provide a new and original history of the culture, politics, and architecture of the Forbidden City. Designed to overawe the visitor with the power of imperial China, the Forbidden City remains one of the true wonders of the world. Item # 34742 ISBN 9780674027794 (Harvard University Press) Price: $19.95

As Renaissance Europe was later astonished to learn of China’s achievement, so today’s reader will be fascinated by this engaging perspective on the history of printing and the technological superiority of Empress Wu’s China. Item # 34711 ISBN 9780300127287 (Yale University Press) Price: $25.00

In City of Heavenly Transquility, long-time resident and journalist Jasper Becker brings back to life the emperors, eunuchs, courtesans, and warriors who for centuries ruled from behind the red walls of the Forbidden City. Becker mixes his own experiences with poignant stories from those who have tried to preserve China's past, struggling against ruthless officials and a fiercely nationalistic government set on changing the fabric of a nation by jettisoning the past and clearing space for the future. In the process, China's officials are demolishing homes and destroying livelihoods, and evicting over three million residents in Beijing alone. Item # 36573 ISBN 9780195309973 (Oxford University Press) Price: $27.95

A fascinating compendium of knowledge about a neglected aspect of Oriental culture, this book will appeal not only to historians of China and Japan, but to the growing number of collectors and museum curators who are interested in incense clocks. It is illustrated with black and white halftones of a large number of the clocks, which are renowned for their beauty of design and quality of workmanship. The book also includes a catalogue of incense clocks which have appeared in auction houses and museums. Item # 2493 ISBN 9780521374828 (Cambridge University Press) Price: $135.00

The author describes the roles of merchant guilds and other elite organizations established to protect the silk industry from outside competition and excessive taxation; the methods and styles of elite networking and investment in building modern silk filatures; and the roles of women—elite women in sericulture reform and peasant women in silkworm raising. She also reveals the cooperation between silk-industry elites and Nationalist government officials in the 1920’s and 1930’s, which resulted in an industry that was virtually state-directed and designed to pass downward to the peasants the costs of building more competitive silk filatures. This discovery challenges the prevailing tendency to think in terms of radical ruptures between Nationalist and Communist rule. Item # 7137 ISBN 0804729980 (Stanford University Press) Price: $54.50

This book examines the crisis from the perspective of Qing prohibition efforts. The author argues that opium prohibition, and not the opium wars, was genuinely imperial in scale and is hence much more representative of the actual drug problem faced by Qing administrators. The study of prohibition also permits a more comprehensive and accurate observation of the economics and criminology of opium. The Qing drug traffic involved the domestic production, distribution, and consumption of opium. A balanced examination of the opium market and state anti-drug policy in terms of prohibition reveals the importance of the empire''s landlocked western frontier regions, which were the domestic production centers, in what has previously been considered an essentially coastal problem. Item # 30900 ISBN 0674016491 (Harvard University Press) Price: $50.00

Overturning the idea that participation in Confucian culture necessitated the obliteration of all other identities, this book offers insight into the world of a group of scholars who felt that their study of the Islamic classics constituted a rightful "school" within the Confucian intellectual landscape. These men were not the first Muslims to master the Chinese Classics. But they were the first to express themselves specifically as Chinese Muslims and to generate foundation myths that made sense of their place both within Islam and within Chinese culture. Item # 31649 ISBN 0674017749 (Harvard University Press) Price: $45.00

See the similarities between today''s pubs and the Tang alehouses, where women were hired to dance and sing to encourage patrons to stay longer and spend more money. Decide for yourself why Yangzhou, a city on the Grand Canal close to the Yangtze River, was considered one of the greatest cities in the Tang Dynasty. Benn translates and paraphrases his classical Chinese sources from the Tang era with fresh and polished prose. He also includes his own illustrations of everything from tools and hairstyles to musical instruments and courtyard dwellings. A history of the rise and fall ofthe dynasty is presented, as is a look at the societal structure of the aristocracy, bureaucracy, eunuchs, clergy, peasants, artisans, merchants, and slaves. This thorough explanation provides fascinating insight into a culture and time that is often misunderstood by Westerners and brings alive both the everyday routine and the timeless splendor of this intellectually and artistically powerful epoch. Enjoy your journey in China''s Golden Age, and come back to the present with a greater understanding of this amazing time. Item # 29850 ISBN 0195176650 (Oxford University Press) Price: $19.95

This book offers a new perspective by suggesting that the old social-political system in this region was destroyed not by the revolutionary action of either the many or the few, but by a long-term process of change that left landlordism tottering on the verge of collapse even before the Communist Party's rise to power. Item # 34548 ISBN 0804718806 (Stanford University Press) Price: $39.00

Some of the most memorable episodes and figures in Chinese literature appear within its pages, and Three Kingdoms has had a profound influence on personal, social, and political behavior, even language usage, in the daily life of people in China today. The novel has inspired countless works of theater and art, and, more recently, has been the source for movies and a television series. Long popular in other countries of East Asia, such as Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, Three Kingdoms has also been introduced to younger generations around the globe through a series of extremely popular computer games. This study helps create a better understanding of the work’s unique place in Chinese culture. Item # 33964 ISBN 9780791470114 (State University of New York SUNY) Price: $60.00

It shows how the Mongol-Yuan rule in China ironically created the conditions for radical changes in the law, which for the first time brought it into line with the goals of Learning the Way Confucians and which curtailed women's financial and personal autonomy. The book re-evaluates the Mongol invasion and its influence on Chinese law and society. Item # 20898 ISBN 0521573734 (Cambridge University Press) Price: $50.00

Comparisons and contrasts are drawn using similar factors in Western and other civilizations, thereby adding significantly to our view of the Western world, past and present, as well as that of China. Most impressive is Bodde's familiarity with original sources and his insistence on providing his own translations of often highly technical work, making availabe to the reader valuabe source material. Item # 850 ISBN 0824813340 (University of Hawaii Press) Price: $40.00

This is the first book to provide a comprehensive picture of the basic concepts and the functioning of imperial Chinese law, as exemplified by 190 cases translated into English from the more than 7,600 contained in the largest of the Chinese casebooks- the Hsing-an hui-lan, or Conspectus ot Penal Cases-covering the years 1736-1885. Item # 35664 (Harvard University Press) Price: $90.00

The later imperial order, in which the state accepted local elite leadership as necessary to its own existence, survived even after Neo-Confucianism lost its hold on the center of intellectual culture in the seventeenth century but continued as the foundation of local education. It is the contention of this book that Neo-Confucianism made that order possible. Item # 35395 ISBN 9780674031067 (Harvard University Press) Price: $49.95

Bredon and Mitrophanow also explore the changing traditions throughout the great country. Where one festival is celebrated in one village, the same festival may have died out centuries ago in another. The ‘great festivals’ are often observed everywhere, but others, no less interesting and no less important to Chinese culture, are unique to certain provinces and districts. As so many of these superstitions and celebrations are fluctuating and even dieing out, it becomes important to make a strong record of these aspects of Chinese tradition before they die out completely. As the original printing of this book was in 1927, many of these rites may no longer exist, further emphasizing the importance of Bredon and Mitrophanow’s work. Much of the material for The Moon Year was gathered first-hand from people they met along their journey, as well as from rare Chinese books and texts, resulting in a refreshingly honest exploration of a great civilization. Item # 33962 ISBN 0710311370 (Kegan Paul) Price: $60.00

Sibao's industry reveals two major trends in print culture: the geographical extension of commercial woodblock publishing to hinterlands previously untouched by commercial book culture and the related social penetration of texts to lower-status levels of the population. Item # 33587 ISBN 9780674024496 (Harvard University Press) Price: $44.95

Finally, she demonstrates that by the end of the 17th century the ledgers were used not so much to facilitate upward mobility as to promote social stability by prescribing standards that encouraged people to keep to the social places. Item # 36316 ISBN 0691055432 (Princeton University Press) Price: $50.00

Brook's outstanding scholarship demonstrates that it was changes in commercial relations and social networks that were actually responsible for the development of a stable society. This imaginative reconsidering of existing scholarship on the history of China will be fascinating reading for scholars and students interested in China's development. Item # 30531 ISBN 0415345073 (Routledge) Price: $34.95

It analyzes the uniquely Chinese aspects of the culture contributing to the development of ancient ritual, and the evolution of ancient and wine rituals into the later "Zhou rituals" (周礼) that so influenced later dynasties. This book is an ideal text for college or graduate-level archaeology or history courses, and provides new insights and perspectives on the origins of civilization and culture in China. Item # 33840 ISBN 9787030188182 (Science Press) Price: $15.95

When the data permits, the authors discuss aspects of Chinese thought - philosophical, religious, and medical - that pertain to food. The contributors include Euguese and Marja Anderson, K.C. Chang, Michael Freeman, Francis and Vera Hsu, Frederick Mote, Edward Schafer, Jonathan Spence, and Ying-shih Yu. Item # 13718 ISBN 0300019386 (Yale University Press) Price: $60.00

Eminent scholars from China and America show how archaeological evidence proves that Chinese culture did not spread from a single central area, as has previously been assumed, but emerged out of geographically diverse, interacting Neolithic cultures. Taking us into the great archaeological finds of the past hundred years-tombs, temples, palaces, cities-they shed new light on many aspects of Chinese life. With a wealth of fascinating detail and hundreds of reproductions of archaeological discoveries, this book is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in Chinese antiquity. Item # 24100 ISBN 0300093829 (Yale University Press) Price: $75.00

Unlike other contemporary sources, the Songshi treatise organizes its subject into an intelligible and detailed narrative, elucidating special terminology, the bureaucracy and its processes, and debates relating to Chinese finance and politics, as well as the salt industry itself. Professor Chien's extensive annotation relies on parallel histories that corroborate and supplement the Songshi account, together providing a comprehensive study of this important institution in China's premodern political economy. Item # 29745 ISBN 0892641630 (University of Michigan Press) Price: $60.00

This lavish, powerful volume explores the life and times of the man who founded a dynasty that would continue to the dawn of the 20th century. It gathers the most recent archaeological data with photographs taken on site expressly for this book-accompanied by essays from archaeologists and experts in Chinese art and history. What emerges is a profile of one of China's most powerful, legendary figures and a new view of one of Asia's most spectacular tourist attractions. Item # 32847 ISBN 8854400823 (White Star Publishers) Price: $60.00

Coloured by intrigue, murder, incest and seduction, Wu's incredible true story is a rich and fascinating tale. Drawing on the original Chinese sources, Jonathan Clements reveals the life of this extraordinary woman who proclaimed herself a living god, founded a new dynasty and was only deposed, aged 79, after jealous courtiers had murdered her two young lovers. Item # 35309 ISBN 9780750939614 (Sutton Publishing) Price: $29.95

Using an unprecedented quantity of primary sources for his life and work, Elegant Debts looks at the ways in which social obligation and gift exchange were central to personal and individual identity in the Ming period. The book also examines Wen's family relationships, his friends, mentors, and pupils, his sense of a distinct local identity, and the interplay of national and regional politics with the achievements of his long life. It uses the insights of a range of scholarship--art history, social and literary history, and anthropology--to show how "self" was constructed in Ming China. In doing so, it makes a major contribution toward a more diverse art history that is less dependent on European conceptions of artists and their work. Item # 29570 ISBN 0824827724 (University of Hawaii Press) Price: $55.00

Craig Clunas uses a wide range of pictures and objects from Ming China to illustrate familiar areas such as painting and ceramics (including the blue-and-white porcelain of the period, arguably the world’s first global “brand”). He draws on items from public and private collections from around the world, which will be new even to specialists, including weapons, architecture, textiles and items of dress, printed books (from Ming pornography to the world’s first illustrated reading book for children). He also examines contemporary sources from government edicts to novels and phrasebooks of colloquial Chinese as well as the most recent scholarship, to illuminate this most diverse period of Chinese art and culture. Item # 33957 ISBN 9780824831493 (University of Hawaii Press) Price: $61.00

The work provides an overview of late imperial society and its responses to forces for change. Its ethnographically rich treatment of changes in family life under Communist rule is based on the author's fieldwork. Kinship beyond the family is treated through comparisons of the author's fieldwork sites in China and Taiwan. In dealing with the use of contracts and commodification within one community setting, it illuminates the broader economic culture of late imperial China. This book powerfully confirms that China's modernity has deep roots in its own tradition, and in doing so offers an excellent introduction to the anthropological view of China. Item # 31742 ISBN 080475067X (Stanford University Press) Price: $24.95

This book begins with an overview of the historical geography, an outline of archaeological evidence for Chu history, and an appreciation of Chu art. Following chapters examine issues of state and society: the ideology of the ruling class, legal procedures, popular culture, and daily life. The final section surveys Chu religion and literature and includes an analysis of the Chuci, the great anthology of Chu poetry, and its impact on mainstream Chinese literature. A translation of the Chu Silk Manuscript, a document that has intrigued scholars since its discovery in Changsha some sixty years ago, is appended. Item # 32746 ISBN 0824829050 (University of Hawaii Press) Price: $27.00

The historical and literary significance of Ouyang4s achievement cannot be underestimated. In rewriting the existing official history of the Five Dynasties, Ouyang -whose own time was characterized by extraordinary intellectual and political innovation -made several notable decisions. He rewrote the history in the "ancient" style preferred by forward-thinking literati; he even rewrote the original documents quoted within biographies. He also relied on his own moral categories, reevaluating the worth of the historical figures in light of his own convictions that individuals should take personal responsibility for the fate of society. Ouyang4s history would eventually become the official version -the last state-sanctioned dynastic history of imperial China to be written by an individual in a private capacity. In addition to its provocative insights and lucid presentation, Historical Records of the Five Dynasties is an eloquent statement on the art of historical writing in the eleventh century. Item # 29417 ISBN 0231128266 (Columbia University Press) Price: $90.00

De Bary maintains his trademark balance of source materials, including seminal readings in the areas of history, society, politics, education, philosophy, and religion, thereby continuing his own tradition of providing an exceptional resource for teachers, scholars, students, and the general reader. Item # 35319 ISBN 9780231143059 (Columbia University Press) Price: $32.50

Drawing from diverse sources—sunken ships, hand-painted scrolls, drowned bodies, and historical and literary records— in this gripping account that moves deftly between the present and the past, Delgado pieces together the fascinating tale of Khubilai Khan's maritime forays and unravels one of history's greatest mysteries: What sank the great Mongol fleet? Item # 36030 ISBN 9780520259768 (University of California Press) Price: $29.95

The main purpose of the book is to analyze ethnic, cultural, and political frontiers between nomads and Chinese in the historical contexts that led to their formation, and to look at cultural perceptions of others as a function of the same historical process. Based on both archaeological and textual sources, this book also introduces a new methodological approach to Chinese frontier history, which combines extensive factual data with a careful scrutiny of the motives, methods, and general conception of history that informed the Chinese historian Ssu-ma Chien. Item # 22338 ISBN 0521770645 (Cambridge University Press) Price: $83.00

During the Six Dynasties, the influences of non-Chinese nomads, the flourishing of Buddhism, and increasing numbers of foreign merchants in the capitals brought about widespread change. The book explores what the archaeological artifacts reveal about this era of innovation and experimentation between the Han and Tang dynasties. Item # 33815 ISBN 9780300074048 (Yale University Press) Price: $85.00

Delving into a history of drugs and their abuses, Narcotic Culture is part revisionist history of imperial and twentieth-century Britain and part sobering portrait of the dangers of prohibition. Item # 30978 ISBN 022614056 (University of Chicago Press) Price: $35.00

Each of these social groups approached Mount Tai with different expectations. Each group's or individual's view of the world, interpersonal relationships, and ultimate goals or dreams--in a word, its identity--was reflected in its interactions with this sacred site. This book examines the behavior of those who made the pilgrimage to Mount Tai and their interpretations of its sacrality and history, as a means of better understanding their identities and mentalities. It is the first to trace the social landscape of Mount Tai, to examine the mindsets not just of prosperous, male literati but also of women and illiterate pilgrims, and to combine evidence from fiction, poetry, travel literature, and official records with the findings of studies of material culture and anthropology. Item # 32989 ISBN 067401653X (Harvard University Press) Price: $50.00

Mr. Eberhard examines several types of Chinese literature (including notably the shan-shu) that have been popular for at least 1,500 years, and draws on them to show how concepts of sin and retribution have changed during this time. He also analyzes a representative collection of short stories, spanning some 800 years, in order to determine how the moral values held by their educated authors differed from those of the more popular writers. Item # 35667 (University of California Press) Price: $35.00

The heart of the book examines in detail the primary fields of collecting - antiquities, calligraphy, and painting. Chapters devoted to each of these use Huizong's catalogues to reconstruct what was in his collection and to probe choices made by the cataloguers. The acts of inclusion, exclusion, and sequencing that they performed allowed them to influence how people thought of the collection, and to attempt to promote or demote particular artists and styles. Item # 35536 ISBN 9780295987781 (University of Washington Press) Price: $65.00

Patricia Ebrey places these sociological analyses of women within the family in an historical context, analysing the development of the wider kinship system. Her work provides an overview of the early modern period, with a specific focus on the Song period (920-1276), a time of marked social and cultural change, and considered to be the beginning of the modern period in Chinese history. With its wide-ranging examination of issues relating to women and the family, this book will be essential reading to scholars of Chinese history and gender studies. Item # 29954 ISBN 0415288231 (Routledge) Price: $53.95

In introducing a selection of imperial, aristocratic and official tombs, the book highlights the fascinating circumstances of burial. It sets the tombs in the broader context of Chinese culture and discusses issues such as the Tang concept of the soul and the afterlife, the politics of mausoleum architecture, the official status of women, and the implications for the living of the burial conditions of family members. Item # 31201 ISBN 041530220X (Routledge) Price: $175.00

Despite differences in each area, certain overarching themes surface repeatedly. Together, these interests and choices suggest a logic behind the new directions of literati culture in the Northern Song. By focusing on the "problem of beauty," the author calls attention to the difficulties that Northern Song innovators faced in justifying these new pursuits. Item # 33364 ISBN 0674022645 (Harvard University Press) Price: $49.95

Enlivened by the personalities of those who cared for the collection, this textured account of the imperial treasures highlights magnificent artworks and their arduous transit through politics, war, and diplomatic reconciliations. Over the years, control of the collections has been fiercely contested, from early dynasties through Mongol and Japanese invaders to Nationalist and Communist rivals - a saga that continues today. This first book-length investigation of the imperial collections will be of great interest to China scholars, historians, and Chinese art specialists. Its tales of palace intrigue will fascinate a wide variety of readers. Item # 33832 ISBN 0295986883 (University of Washington Press) Price: $19.95

Elman examines the conflicting New Text versus Old Text portraits of Confucius in order to gain a more precise grasp of classical studies in imperial China as the ideological source for the "constitutionality" of the Confucian imperium. Central to his argument is the discovery that kinship organizations in premodern China played an important role in fostering schools of learning such as the Ch'ang-chou New Text school. Accordingly, this study affords us a unique perspective on how members of the gentry sought to impose their agenda on the state in an effort to survive the great changes occurring during the Ming and Ch'ing dynasties. Item # 4057 ISBN 0520066731 (University of California Press) Price: $40.00

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, imperial reformers, early Republicans, Guomindang party cadres, and Chinese Communists have all prioritized science and technology. In this book, Elman gives a nuanced account of the ways in which native Chinese science evolved over four centuries, under the influence of both Jesuit and Protestant missionaries. In the end, he argues, the Chinese produced modern science on their own terms. Item # 31097 ISBN 0674016858 (Harvard University Press) Price: $63.00

A key element fostering this change was the Qing courts promotion of Gelukpa orthodoxy, which not only transformed Mongol historical narratives and rituals but also displaced the earlier vernacular Mongolian Buddhism. Finally, Elverskog demonstrates how this eighteenth-century conception of a Mongol community, ruled by an aristocracy and nourished by a Buddhist emperor, gave way to a pan-Qing solidarity of all Buddhist peoples against Muslims and Christians and to local identities that united for the first time aristocrats with commoners in a new Mongol Buddhist identity on the eve of the twentieth century. Item # 32988 ISBN 0824830210 (University of Hawaii Press) Price: $52.00

Drawing on classic Japanese and Chinese resources on the area and recent scholarship, Professor Enatsu presents a fine analysis of the interplay between historical Qing institutions and emerging modern political practices during this tumultuous period. Item # 29746 ISBN 0892641657 (University of Michigan Press) Price: $50.00

The text, by veteran Sinologist Jonathan Fenby, probes the glories of the Manchu Empire, the plight of the common man, extremes of wealth and poverty, foreign incursions, the Nationalist attempts to found a new nation, the Japanese intervention - and the eventual outcome. Item # 36275 ISBN 9789889826918 (FormAsia) Price: $59.95

This book is in some ways a biography of a city that acquired a personality, even a gender, and became an actor in its own history. Yangzhou invites attention because its place in China''s cultural iconography tells us not only of one city''s vicissitudes and fortunes but also of changes in the geography of the Chinese imagination. The author examines the city''s place in the history of the late imperial era and of the meanings that accrued to Yangzhou over time. She argues that the actual construction of the city--its academies of learning, its philanthropic institutions, its gardens, its teahouses, and its brothels--underpinned the construction of a certain idea of Yangzhou. Item # 29910 ISBN 0674013921 (Harvard University Press) Price: $49.50

Her reading of the life and work of women writers reveals surprising instances and modes of self-empowerment within the gender constraints of Confucian orthodoxy. Fong argues that literate women in late imperial China used writing and reading to create literary and social communities, transcend temporal-spatial and social limitations, and represent themselves as the authors of their own life histories. Item # 34805 ISBN 9780824831868 (University of Hawaii Press) Price: $55.00

Governing notions of the social order (and interrelated constructions of gender) changed radically in the modern erainitially with the questioning of the imperial, dynastic order and the creation of a Chinese republic in the early twentieth century, later with the creation of a Communist government and, most recently, with China''s political and cultural transformations in the post-Mao era. As ideas and practices of gender have changed, the persistence of older rhetorical signs in the interstices of new political visions has complicated the social projects and understandings of modernity, especially in terms of the creation of new public spaces, new concepts of work and virtue, and new configurations of gender. Item # 31099 ISBN 0742538257 (Rowman & Littlefield) Price: $18.95

In exploring exactly what their crucial role was, he addresses the day-to-day life of modern Chinese religion from the perspective of ordinary religious specialists. This approach highlights the social processes, institutions, and networks that transmit religious knowledge and mediate between prestigious religious traditions and the people in the street. In modern Chinese religion, the Taoists are such key actors. Without them, "Taoist ritual" and "Taoist self-cultivation" are just empty words. Item # 33585 ISBN 9780674025059 (Harvard University Press) Price: $49.95

The book lays out the historical relationship between North China and the Northeast (Manchuria) and concludes with an examination of ongoing population movement between these regions since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. Item # 29747 ISBN 0892641347 (University of Michigan Press) Price: $45.00

Drawing on classical Chinese sources and the best modern scholarship from China and Japan, David A. Graff connects military affairs with political and social developments to show how China's history was shaped by war. The first survey of medieval Chinese military history to be published in English, this seminal text will be of appeal to readers of both military and Chinese history. Item # 20927 ISBN 0415239559 (Routledge) Price: $39.95

Eminent Nuns is an innovative interdisciplinary work that brings together several of these important seventeenth-century trends. Although Buddhist nuns have been a continuous presence in Chinese culture since early medieval times and the subject of numerous scholarly studies, this book is one of the first not only to provide a detailed view of their activities at one particular moment in time, but also to be based largely on the writings and self-representations of Buddhist nuns themselves. This perspective is made possible by the preservation of collections of “discourse records” (yulu) of seven officially designated female Chan masters in a seventeenth-century printing of the Chinese Buddhist Canon rarely used in English-language scholarship. The collections contain records of religious sermons and exchanges, letters, prose pieces, and poems, as well as biographical and autobiographical accounts of various kinds. Supplemental sources by Chan monks and male literati from the same region and period make a detailed re-creation of the lives of these eminent nuns possible. Item # 35219 ISBN 9780824832025 (University of Hawaii Press) Price: $46.00

The description of the driving force of expanding British imperialism is based in large part on the papers of the Jardine Matheson and Co., the largest of the firms doing business in Canton at the time and the only one to survive form "pre-treaty" days. They shed an intimate and unflattering light on the operations of foreign merchants in China, and on the long history of pillage that set the stage for the Chinese revolution. Item # 34562 ISBN 0853454973 (Monthly Review Press) Price: $15.00

The author shows how local elites appropriated the performance of Mulian, turning it into a powerful medium for conveying orthodox values and religious precepts and for negotiating local social and gender issues altered by the rising money economy. The sociocultural approach of this historical study lifts Mulian out of the exorcistic-dramatic-ethnographic milieu to which it is usually consigned. This new approach enables the author to develop an alternative interpretation of Chinese popular culture and the Confucian tradition, which in turn sheds significant new light upon the social history of late imperial China. Item # 30974 ISBN 0804750327 (Stanford University Press) Price: $70.00

The magnificent old engravings, rare hand-colored lantern slides, stunning studio portraits, candid amateur photographs, fascinating postcards, and charming hand-colored prints come from the author''s private collection. The informative text brilliantly captures the atmosphere of China throughout the centuries. The result is a lavishly illustrated social history, and an exciting hodgepodge of merchants, mercenaries, missionaries, and adventurers set against the great backdrop of China''s cities and ancient culture. Item # 30388 ISBN 0804835195 (Tuttle) Price: $50.00

By contrasting differing rates of religious change in the lowland and highland regions of the lower Yangzi valley, Hansen suggests that the commercial and social developments were far less uniform than previously thought. In 1100, nearly all people in South China worshipped gods who had been local residents prior to their deaths. The increasing mobility of cultivators in the lowland, rice-growing regions resulted in the adoption of gods from other places. Cults in the isolated mountain areas showed considerably less change. Item # 36314 ISBN 0691055599 (Princeton University Press) Price: $85.00

Harrist draws on insights from the fields of art history, social and political history, literature, and religion to present detailed case studies of important moya sites, such as the Stone Gate tunnel in Shaanxi and Cloud Peak Mountain, Mount Tie, and Mount Tai in Shangdong. The inscriptions analyzed represent a range of literary genres and content, including poetry, Buddhist sutras, records of imperial rituals, and commemorations of virtuous conduct in public life. Item # 34808 ISBN 9780295987286 (University of Washington Press) Price: $60.00

The book also depicts the changing worlds of Paris, Tokyo and the other international stages of Der Ling's development as woman and as mystery, and deals with the many teachers who made her who she was: Isadora Duncan, Sarah Bernhardt, the Empress of Japan, her own broad-minded father, American society figures like Barbara Hutton, and most of all, the Empress Dowager Cixi, who knew all about being several different people at once. Item # 35312 ISBN 9789622098817 (Hong Kong University Press) Price: $35.00

Writing and Law in Late Imperial China explores works of crime-case fiction, judicial handbooks for magistrates and legal secretaries, popular attitudes toward clergy and merchants as reflected in legal plaints, and the belief in a parallel, otherworldly judicial system that supports earthly justice. Item # 33951 ISBN 9780295986913 (University of Washington Press) Price: $65.00

In these pages, he emerges as a naive and impressionable person, manipulated by successive governments and virtually imprisoned by historical events. Item # 36267 ISBN 9889826933 (FormAsia) Price: $27.95

Beginning with the Qin dynasty conquest of 221 B.C. which brought large portions of what are now Korea and Vietnam within China's frontiers, the book goes on to examine the period of intense interaction that followed with the many scattered local tribal cultures then under China's imperial sway as well as across its borders. Even the distant Japanese islands could not escape being profoundly transformed by developments on the mainland. Eventually, under the looming shadow of the Chinese empire, independent native states and civilizations matured for the first time in both Japan and Korea, and one frontier region, later known as Vietnam, moved toward independence. Item # 20611 ISBN 0824824652 (University of Hawaii Press) Price: $24.95

Adorning The Empress tells another story, for the women of the elite, no less than for those in peasant homes, bound feet and a strict social code kept them confined within their imprisoning courtyards. Theirs was a world as much of cruelty and sorrow as of grandeur and luxury. Item # 29376 ISBN 9627283851 (FormAsia) Price: $19.95

To illustrate the distinct characteristics of these three periods, Hon compares commentaries by Hu Yuan, Zhang Zai, and Cheng Yi with five other Yijing commentaries, highlighting the broad parameters, as well as the specific content, of an extremely important world of discoursethe debate on literati activism. These differing views on the literati''s role in civil governance prove how lively, diverse, and intense Northern Song intellectual life was, while also reminding us how important it is to understand the history of the period on its own terms. Item # 30278 ISBN 0791463117 (State University of New York SUNY) Price: $70.00

Although mapping in China is almost as old as Chinese civilization itself, the Qing insistence on accurate, to-scale maps of their territory was a new response to the difficulties of administering a vast and growing empire. Likewise, direct observation became increasingly important to Qing ethnographic writings, such as the illustrated manuscripts known as "Miao albums" (from which twenty color paintings are reproduced in this book). These were intended to educate Qing officials about various non-Han peoples so that they could govern these groups more effectively.Hostetler's groundbreaking account will interest anyone studying the history of the early modern period and colonialism. Item # 20944 ISBN 0226354202 (University of Chicago Press) Price: $42.50

The study keeps in view throughout the issue of representation versus practice, the role of memory, and the importance of listening for what is not said. Item # 31140 ISBN 0804741646 (Stanford University Press) Price: $70.00

The book asks the question: What changes occurred and what remained the same in Chinese civil justice from the Qing to the Republic? Civil justice is here interpreted to mean not only codified law but also actual legal practice. Since the consequences of court actions frequently differed from the codes intent, this book also addresses the question of how legal practice mediated between code and custom. It aims to track the developing history of the legal system and to discover what it meant in the lives of the Chinese people. Item # 17247 ISBN 0804741115 (Stanford University Press) Price: $19.95

Mr. Huang has written a highly readable account of the panorama of Chinese history that will challenge and fascinate scholar and layperson alike. This revised edition updates the original with a new preface, additional illustrations in the facile hand of the author, and a more reader-friendly format. Item # 19537 ISBN 1563247313 (M.E. Sharpe) Price: $25.95

This original and probing work traces the most significant strands of the new post-1895 discourse, concentrating on the anxieties inherent in a complicated process of cultural transformation. It focuses principally on how the need to accommodate the West was reflected in such landmark novels of the period as Wu Jianren''s Strange Events Eyewitnessed in the Past Twenty Years and Zhu Shouju''s Tides of the Huangpu, which began serial publication in Shanghai in 1916. The negative tone of these narratives contrasts sharply with the facile optimism that characterizes the many essays on the "New Novel" appearing in the popular press of the time. Neither iconoclasm nor the wholesale embrace of the new could square the contradicting intellectual demands imposed by the momentous alternatives presenting themselves. Item # 30878 ISBN 0824828380 (University of Hawaii Press) Price: $57.00

The 14 essays in these volume reexamine the assumptions of how state power functioned, particularly the assumption of a sharp divide between state and society. The general conclusion is that the state was only one actor (albeit powerful) in a culture that elites and commoners could shape, either in cooperation with the state or in competition with it. Item # 2966 ISBN 0804728682 (Stanford University Press) Price: $32.95

The present volume is the first book-length consideration of this important text, which has been an ongoing source of literary and social history. Alister D. Inglis explores fundamental questions surrounding the work and its making, such as theme, genre, authorial intent, the veracity of the accounts, and their circulation in both oral and written form. In addition to a brief outline of Hong Mai’s life that incorporates Hong’s autobiographical anecdotes, the book includes many intriguing stories translated into English for the first time, including Hong’s legendary thirty-one prefaces. Record of the Listener fills the gaps left by official Chinese historians who, unlike Hong Mai, did not comment on women’s affairs, ghosts and the paranormal, local crime, human sacrifice, little-known locales, and unofficial biographies. Item # 33067 ISBN 0791468216 (State University of New York SUNY) Price: $45.00

This publication is an aesthetic, highly personal, and deeply respectful exploration of the facts and the fiction surrounding this fascinating and little-studied erotic custom. Initially drawn to the extraordinary beauty of the shoes themselves, the author then became captivated by the women who created them and wore them - by their marvelous creativity, and by their terrible suffering. Item # 5029 ISBN 0898159571 (Ten Speed Press) Price: $24.95

His astonishingly multifarious activities are now for the first time pieced together within their (Chinese and Western) social, intellectual and cultural context. The result is a composite profile of this complex figure that is solidly anchored in Chinese (and Western) primary sources A major achievement. Item # 19170 ISBN 9004120580 (Brill Academic Publishers) Price: $228.00

It is, David Johnson argues, impossible to form an adequate idea of traditional Chinese society without a thorough understanding of village ritual. Newly discovered liturgical manuscripts allow him to reconstruct North Chinese temple festivals in unprecedented detail and prove that they are sharply different from the Daoist- and Buddhist-based communal rituals of South China. Item # 36572 ISBN 9780674033047 (Harvard University Press) Price: $49.95

Johnston sets out to answer two empirical questions. Is there a substantively consistent and temporally persistent Chinese strategic culture? If so, to what extent has it influenced China''s approaches to security? The focus of his study is the Ming dynasty''s grand strategy against the Mongols (1368-1644). First Johnston examines ancient military texts as sources of Chinese strategic culture, using cognitive mapping, symbolic analysis and congruence tests to determine whether there is a consistent grand strategic preference ranking across texts that constitutes a single strategic culture. Then he applies similar techniques to determine the effect of the strategic culture on the strategic preferences of the Ming decision makers. Finally, he assesses the effect of these preferences on Ming policies towards the Mongol ''threat.'''' Item # 8669 ISBN 0691002398 (Princeton University Press) Price: $22.95

This is the first detailed study in English of the Western reception of the monument since its discovery in Xi'an in 1625. It will be essential reading for those interested in East Asian colonialism, in the vagaries of cross-cultural contact between East and West, and in the way in which, from the very beginning of the period of Western presence in China, the empire was viewed as little more than an extension of European prejudices about the superiority of its own cultures, religions, and conceptual paradigms. Item # 35363 ISBN 9789622098954 (Hong Kong University Press) Price: $49.50

The scholarly originality of these essays rests firmly on their authors' control over ancient sources, newly excavated materials, and modern scholarship across all major Sinological languages. The extensive bibliography is in itself a valuable and reliable reference resource. Item # 33217 ISBN 0295985623 (University of Washington Press) Price: $40.00

The book describes the dangers that haunted children of high status, with the rules of succession, shifting power structures at court, and traditional views on patriarchy and parental authority (including the right of life and death over children) contributing to their vulnerability. Item # 28792 ISBN 0804747318 (Stanford University Press) Price: $57.95

The authors also show the fascinating process of constructing a historical jigsaw puzzle. Archaeologist discover a 400,000 year old skull near modern day Beijing and determine that it is one of our earliest human ancestors. A scholar who prescribed ''dragon bones'' to cure an illness realizes that the bones - which are actually turtle shells - contain ancient Chinese writing used to send messages to the gods. Other discoveries weave a dramatic story of rulers, writers, soldiers and citizens who made up the world of ancient China. Item # 30433 ISBN 0195171020 (Oxford University Press) Price: $32.95

Keith Knapp begins this far-ranging and persuasive study by describing two related historical trends that account for the narrative's popularity: the growth of extended families and the rapid incursion of Confucianism among China's learned elite. Extended families were better at maintaining their status and power, so patriarchs found it expedient to embrace Confucianism to keep their large, fragile households intact. Knapp then focuses on the filial piety stories themselves--their structure, historicity, origin, function, and transmission--and argues that most stem from the oral culture of these elite extended families. After examining collections of filial piety tales, known as Accounts of Filial Children, he shifts from text to motif, exploring the most common theme: the "reverent care" and mourning of parents. In the final chapter, Knapp looks at the relative burden that filiality placed on men and women and concludes that, although women largely performed the same filial acts as men, they had to go to greater extremes to prove their sincerity. Item # 31872 ISBN 0824828666 (University of Hawaii Press) Price: $54.00

In Rhetoric of Persuasion, we see that in both the third-century court of the last Han emperor and the fourteenth-century court of Edward II, rhetoric served to justify the deposition of a ruler and the establishment of a new regime. Rhetoric of Taste examines the court''s influence on aesthetic values in China and Japan, specifically literary tastes in ninth-century China, the melding of literary and historical texts into a sort of national history in fifteenth-century Japan, and the embrace of literati painting innovations in twelfth-century China during a time when the literati themselves were out of favor. Rhetoric of Communication considers official communications to the throne in third-century China, the importance of secret communications in Charlemagne''s court, and the implications of the use of classical Chinese in the Japanese court during the eighth and ninth centuries. Rhetoric of Gender offers the biography of a former Han emperor''s favorite consort and studies the metaphorical possibilities of Tang palace plaints. Rhetoric of Natural Nobility focuses on Dante''s efforts to confirm his nobility of soul as a poet, surmounting his non-noble ancestry, and the development of the texts that supported the political ideologies of the fifteenth-century Burgundian dukes Philip the Good and Charles the Bold. Item # 30853 ISBN 0295984503 (University of Washington Press) Price: $35.00

Lu retained a group of scholars whose aim was to encompass the worlds knowledge in one great encyclopedia; so delighted was Lu with the finished work that he is said to have offered a fabulous prize of gold to anyone who could add or subtract even a single word. Item # 17173 ISBN 0804733546 (Stanford University Press) Price: $95.00

Cinderella's Sisters argues that rather than stemming from sexual perversion, men's desire for bound feet was connected to larger concerns such as cultural nostalgia, regional rivalries, and claims of male privilege. Nor were women hapless victims, the author contends. Ko describes how women--those who could afford it--bound their own and their daughters' feet to signal their high status and self-respect. Femininity, like the binding of feet, was associated with bodily labor and domestic work, and properly bound feet and beautifully made shoes both required exquisite skills and technical knowledge passed from generation to generation. Throughout her narrative, Ko deftly wields methods of social history, literary criticism, material culture studies, and the history of the body and fashion to illustrate how a practice that began as embodied lyricism--as a way to live as the poets imagined--ended up being an exercise in excess and folly. Item # 32272 ISBN 0520218841 (University of California Press) Price: $31.95

What emerges is a concept of Confucianism that is dynamic instead of monolithic in shaping the cultures of East Asian societies. As teachers, mothers, writers, and rulers, women were active agents in this process. Neither rebels nor victims, these women embraced aspects of official norms while resisting others. The essays present a powerful image of what it meant to be female and to live a woman's life in a variety of social settings and historical circumstances. Challenging the conventional notion of Confucianism as an oppressive tradition that victimized women, this provocative book reveals it as a modern construct that does not reflect the social and cultural histories of East Asia before the nineteenth century. Item # 27955 ISBN 0520231384 (University of California Press) Price: $24.95

The Age of Confucian Rule is an essential introduction to this transformative era. “A scholar should congratulate himself that he has been born in such a time” (Zhao Ruyu, 1194). Item # 35659 ISBN 9780674031463 (Harvard University Press) Price: $35.00

Topics examined range from preconceptions about the capacity of the Chinese language to accommodate foreign ideas, the formation of specific nomenclatures and the roles of individual translators, to Chinese and European attempts at coming to terms with each others grammar.By systematically analysing and assessing the lexical adaptation of Western notions in Chinese contexts, the book will serve as a valuable reference work for all those interested in the historical semantics of modern China. Item # 17182 ISBN 9004120467 (Brill Academic Publishers) Price: $229.00

Painstakingly researched, the book describes Johnston's travels in China; the terrorist tactics of the Boxer Movement; Johnston's condemnation of Christian missionaries in China; and the women in his life. Item # 18051 ISBN 0750921064 (Sutton Publishing) Price: $34.95

The book studies the development of schools and the examination system, the interaction between state, society and education, and the vicissitudes of the private academies. It examines family education, life of intellectuals, and the conventions of intellectual discourse. It also discusses the formation of the tradition of classical learning, and presents the first detailed account of student movements in traditional China, with an extensive bibliography. While a general survey, this book includes various new ideas and inquiries. It concludes with a critical evaluation of China's rich educational experiences. Item # 15466 ISBN 9004103635 (Brill Academic Publishers) Price: $394.00

Factionalists used the same polarizing rhetoric to vilify their opponents—who rejected their exclusive claims to authority as well as their ideological program—as treacherous and disloyal. They pressured emperors and regents to identify the malign factions that were spreading at court and expel them from the metropolitan bureaucracy before they undermined the dynastic polity. By analyzing theoretical essays, court memorials, and political debates from the period, Levine interrogates the intellectual assumptions and linguistic limitations that prevented Northern Song politicians from defending or even acknowledging the existence of factions. From the Northern Song to the Ming and Qing dynasties, this dominant discourse of authority continued to restrain members of China’s sociopolitical elite from articulating interests that acted independently from, or in opposition to, the dynastic polity. Item # 35320 ISBN 9780824832667 (University of Hawaii Press) Price: $55.00

By the time China was reunited by the Sui dynasty in 589 ce, the elite had been drawn into the state order, and imperial power had assumed a more transcendent nature. The Chinese were incorporated into a new world system in which they exchanged goods and ideas with states that shared a common Buddhist religion. The centuries between the Han and the Tang thus had a profound and permanent impact on the Chinese world. Item # 35630 ISBN 9780674026056 (Harvard University Press) Price: $29.95

Despite the romantic aura attached to the Tang, it was not a time of unending peace. In 756, General An Lushan led a revolt that shook the country to its core, weakening the government to such a degree that by the early tenth century, regional warlordism gripped many areas, heralding the decline of the Great Tang. Item # 36343 ISBN 9780674033061 (Harvard University Press) Price: $35.00

The work offers a new interpretation of the changes that underlay the transformation of the Chinese polity from a league of city states dominated by aristocratic lineages to a unified, territorial state controlled by a supreme autocrat and his agents. In addition, it shows how a new pattern of violence was rationalized and how the Chinese of the period incorporated their ideas about violence into the myths and proto-scientific theories that provided historical and natural prototypes for the imperial state. Item # 4021 ISBN 0791400778 (State University of New York SUNY) Price: $29.95

This volume is devoted to the Tangut language, with pronunciation guide as well as black and white photographs of actual Tangut scripts found at Khara-Khoto. Item # 34395 ISBN 7500456883 (Zhongguo Shehui Kexue 中国社会科学) Price: $95.00

This volume is an in-depth study into the works of famed Russian Tangut scholar N. A. Nevskij. A Lenin State Prize Award winner, Nevskij made significant contributions to the research of the Tangut language by compiling the first Tangut dictionary and reconstructing the meaning of multiple Tangut grammatical particles, making it possible to actually read Tangut. Accompanied with scholarly analysis, this volume reproduces Nevskij’s hand-written notes and essays, adding more intrigue to the study of Tangut. Item # 34399 ISBN 7500460961 (Zhongguo Shehui Kexue 中国社会科学) Price: $95.00

This volume focuses on the intricacies of ancient Tangut culture. Includes myriad scholarly essays compiled between 1995 and 2005 for subsequent symposiums held during that period. Topics include religion, philosophy, history and much more. Item # 34396 ISBN 7500436262 (Zhongguo Shehui Kexue 中国社会科学) Price: $95.00

This volume focuses on the Buddhist sutras recovered at Khara-Khoto. Multiple source examples are provided, allowing the reader to understand the texts as they were originally presented. Also includes analysis of Tangut seals. Item # 34397 ISBN 7500460947 (Zhongguo Shehui Kexue 中国社会科学) Price: $95.00

This volume is a reproduction and study of the 1933 publication Xixia yanjiu written by prolific Tangut expert and scholar Wang Jingru. This volume is considered to be one of the most thorough studies of the Tangut language, complete with Romanized pronunciation and transliteration of the ancient Tangut texts. Item # 34398 ISBN 7500460954 (Zhongguo Shehui Kexue 中国社会科学) Price: $95.00

This volume is devoted to the Tangut language, with black and white reproductions of actual Tangut language rubbings. Item # 34394 ISBN 7500452047 (Zhongguo Shehui Kexue 中国社会科学) Price: $95.00