Discover the rarified Peranakan (native-born Chinese of Southeast Asia) aesthetics that are today highly sought-after for their beauty: distinctive furniture and ceramics, textiles and jewelry, and many other art objects. Peranakan Chinese Home displays these extraordinary objects, visible markers of a highly developed culture. The broad range of beautiful objects which the Peranakan Chinese created and enjoyed in their daily lives is astounding. Each chapter in The Peranakan Chinese Home focuses on a different area and presents objects used or found in those spaces. Each piece is described in the context of their utility as household objects, as part of periodic celebrations to mark the Chinese New Year and other holidays, or in important life passage rituals relating to ancestor worship, birth, marriage, mourning and burial. The meaning of the rich symbolic and ornamental motifs found on the objects is discussed in detail, and key differences are highlighted between Peranakan objects and similar ones found in China. A fascinating mix of Chinese, European and Southeast Asian influences, the distinctly Peranakan identity of a people and their culture is beautifully portrayed through objects and archival photographs in this lovely and exotic book.

Timber-framed architecture has long been viewed as an embodiment of Chinese civilization, a hierarchic society ruled by Confucian orthodoxy. Throughout its history, Chinese architectural design was closely regulated by court-enforced building codes, which created a highly standardized and modularized system. In Diversity in the Great Unity - the first in-depth English-language work to present regional traditions of Chinese architecture based on a detailed study of the timber construction system - Lala Zuo maintains that during the nearly century-long Yuan dynasty (1271-1368), the tradition of "Han-Chinese" architecture as coded, uniform, and controlled by the central government did not take hold. She presents case studies of twenty buildings along the Yangtze River built during the Yuan, often considered a transitional phase in Chinese architectural history. Most of the structures have firm dates, and all are analyzed according to patronage, chronology, and function. Their representativeness is determined by their broad geographic distribution as well as by their scarcity. Numerous photographs and line-drawings accompany the analyses. Referencing Yuan architecture in north China along the Yellow River, Zuo outlines its characteristics in three regions and connects the regional traditions to periods before and after the Yuan, allowing her to contextualize architecture in Yuan social and political history. She explains how the division of regional traditions, especially those in the south, contributed to the transformation of dynastic styles from the Song (960-1279) to the Ming (1368-1644) and how the Song-Yuan migration may have affected architectural design. An appendix presents an extensive glossary of Chinese architectural terms in Song terminology to enable a better understanding of the subject. Although the primary focus of this book is the technical evolution of surviving Yuan architecture, its interdisciplinary approach goes beyond architecture by offering a re-evaluation of Chinese society in light of cultural and religious diversity under Mongol rule.

Utopia" is a word not often associated with the city of Bangkok, which is better known for its disorderly sprawl, overburdened roads, and stifling levels of pollution. Yet as early as 1782, when the city was officially founded on the banks of the Chao Phraya river as the home of the Chakri dynasty, its orientation was based on material and rhetorical considerations that alluded to ideal times and spaces. The construction of palaces, monastic complexes, walls, forts, and canals created a defensive network while symbolically locating the terrestrial realm of the king within the Theravada Buddhist cosmos. Into the twentieth century, pictorial, narrative, and built representations of utopia were critical to Bangkok's transformation into a national capital and commercial entrepot. But as older representations of the universe encountered modern architecture, building technologies, and urban planning, new images of an ideal society attempted to reconcile urban-based understandings of Buddhist liberation and felicitous states like nirvana with worldly models of political community like the nation-state. Bangkok Utopia outlines an alternative genealogy of both utopia and modernism in a part of the world that has often been overlooked by researchers of both. It examines representations of utopia that developed in the city-as expressed in built forms as well as architectural drawings, building manuals, novels, poetry, and ecclesiastical murals-from its first general strike of migrant laborers in 1910 to the overthrow of the military dictatorship in 1973. Using Thai- and Chinese-language archival sources, the book demonstrates how the new spaces of the city became arenas for modern subject formation, utopian desires, political hegemony, and social unrest, arguing that the modern city was a space of antinomy-one able not only to sustain heterogeneous temporalities, but also to support conflicting world views within the urban landscape. By underscoring the paradoxical character of utopias and their formal narrative expressions of both hope and hegemony, Bangkok Utopia provides an innovative way to conceptualize the uneven economic development and fractured political conditions of contemporary global cities.