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A Portrait of Five Dynasties China - From the Memoirs of Wang Renyu (880-956) (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R3,353
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A Portrait of Five Dynasties China - From the Memoirs of Wang Renyu (880-956) (Hardcover)
Series: Oxford Oriental Monographs
Expected to ship within 12 - 19 working days
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The anecdotal literature of late-medieval China is not unknown, but
it is under-used. Glen Dudbridge explores two collections of
anecdotal memoirs to construct an intimate portrait of the first
half of the tenth century as seen by people who lived through it.
The author Wang Renyu's adult life coincided closely with that
period, and his memoirs, though not directly transmitted, can be
largely recovered from encyclopaedia quotations. His experience led
from early life on the north-west border with Tibet, through
service with the kingdom of Shu, to a mainstream career under four
successive dynasties in northern China. He bore personal witness to
some great events, but also travelled widely and transcribed
material from a lifetime of conversations with colleagues in the
imperial Hanlin Academy. The study first sets Wang's life in its
historical context and discusses the nature and value of his
memoirs. It then pursues a number of underlying themes that run
through the collections, presenting nearly 80 distinct items in
translation. Together these offer a characterization of an age of
inter-regional warfare in which individual lives, not grand
historical narrative, form the focus. A nuanced self-portrait of
the author emerges, combining features that seem alien to modern
values with others that seem more familiar. Four appendixes give
the text of the author's tombstone epitaph; a detailed list of his
surviving memoir items; data from Song catalogues on the early
transmission of his writings; and Wang Renyu's own definition of
the four musical modes inherited from the Tang dynasty.
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