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In 221 BC, the First Emperor of Qin unified the lands that would
become the heart of a Chinese empire. Though forged by conquest,
this vast domain depended for its political survival on a
fundamental reshaping of Chinese culture. With this informative
book, we are present at the creation of an ancient imperial order
whose major features would endure for two millennia. The Qin and
Han constitute the "classical period" of Chinese history-a role
played by the Greeks and Romans in the West. Mark Edward Lewis
highlights the key challenges faced by the court officials and
scholars who set about governing an empire of such scale and
diversity of peoples. He traces the drastic measures taken to
transcend, without eliminating, these regional differences: the
invention of the emperor as the divine embodiment of the state; the
establishment of a common script for communication and a
state-sponsored canon for the propagation of Confucian ideals; the
flourishing of the great families, whose domination of local
society rested on wealth, landholding, and elaborate kinship
structures; the demilitarization of the interior; and the impact of
non-Chinese warrior-nomads in setting the boundaries of an emerging
Chinese identity. The first of a six-volume series on the history
of imperial China, The Early Chinese Empires illuminates many
formative events in China's long history of imperialism-events
whose residual influence can still be discerned today.
The Lady of Linshui—the goddess of women, childbirth, and
childhood—is still venerated in south China, Taiwan, and
Southeast Asia. Her story evolved from the life of Chen Jinggu in
the eighth century and blossomed in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644)
into vernacular short fiction, legends, plays, sutras, and stele
inscriptions at temples where she is worshipped. The full-length
novel The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons narrates Chen Jinggu’s
lifelong struggle with and eventual triumph over her spirit double
and rival, the White Snake demon. Among accounts of goddesses in
late imperial China, this work is unique in its focus on the
physical aspects of womanhood, especially the dangers of
childbirth, and in its dramatization of the contradictory nature of
Chinese divinities. This unabridged, annotated translation provides
insights into late imperial Chinese religion, the lives of women,
and the structure of families and local society.
After the collapse of the Han dynasty in the third century CE,
China divided along a north-south line. Mark Lewis traces the
changes that both underlay and resulted from this split in a period
that saw the geographic redefinition of China, more engagement with
the outside world, significant changes to family life, developments
in the literary and social arenas, and the introduction of new
religions.
The Yangzi River valley arose as the rice-producing center of
the country. Literature moved beyond the court and capital to
depict local culture, and newly emerging social spaces included the
garden, temple, salon, and country villa. The growth of
self-defined genteel families expanded the notion of the elite,
moving it away from the traditional great Han families identified
mostly by material wealth. Trailing the rebel movements that
toppled the Han, the new faiths of Daoism and Buddhism altered
every aspect of life, including the state, kinship structures, and
the economy.
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.
Distinguished historians of the ancient world analyze the earliest
developments in human history and the rise of the first major
civilizations, from the Middle East to India and China. In this
volume of the six-part History of the World series, Hans-Joachim
Gehrke, a noted scholar of ancient Greece, leads a distinguished
group of historians in analyzing prehistory, the earliest human
settlements, and the rise of the world’s first advanced
civilizations. The Neolithic period—sometimes called the Agrarian
Revolution—marked a turning point in human history. People were
no longer dependent entirely on hunting animals and gathering
plants but instead cultivated crops and reared livestock. This led
to a more settled existence, notably along rivers such as the Nile,
Tigris, Euphrates, Ganges, and Yangzi. Increased mastery of metals,
together with innovations in tools and technologies, led to
economic specialization, from intricate crafts to deadlier weapons,
which contributed to the growth of village communities as well as
trade networks. Family was the fundamental social unit, its
relationships and hierarchies modeled on the evolving relationship
between ruler and ruled. Religion, whether polytheist or
monotheist, played a central role in shaping civilizations from the
Persians to the Israelites. The world was construed in terms of a
divinely ordained order: the Chinese imperial title Huangdi
expressed divinity and heavenly splendor, while Indian emperor
Ashoka was heralded as the embodiment of moral law. From the latest
findings about the Neanderthals to the founding of imperial China
to the world of Western classical antiquity, Making Civilizations
offers an authoritative overview of humanity’s earliest eras.
Violence, both physical and nonphysical, is central to any society,
but it is a version of the problem that it claims to solve. This
Element examines how states in ancient East Asia, from the late
Shang through the end of the Han dynasty, wielded violence to
create and display authority, and also how their licit violence was
entangled in the 'savage' or 'criminal' violence whose suppression
justified their power. The East Asian cases are supplemented
through citing comparable Western ones. The themes examined include
the emergence of the warrior as a human type, the overlap of hunts
and combat (and the overlap between treatments of alien species and
alien peoples), sacrifice of both alien captives and 'death
attendants' from one's own groups, the impact of military
specialization and the increased scale of armies, the emergent
ideal of self-sacrifice, and the diverse aspects of violence in the
regime of law.
This book examines the formation of the Chinese empire through its
reorganization and reinterpretation of its basic spatial units: the
human body, the household, the city, the region, and the world. The
central theme of the book is the way all these forms of ordered
space were reshaped by the project of unification and how, at the
same time, that unification was constrained and limited by the
necessary survival of the units on which it was based.
Consequently, as Mark Edward Lewis shows, each level of spatial
organization could achieve order and meaning only within an
encompassing, superior whole: the body within the household, the
household within the lineage and state, the city within the region,
and the region within the world empire, while each level still
contained within itself the smaller units from which it was formed.
The unity that was the empire's highest goal avoided collapse back
into the original chaos of nondistinction only by preserving within
itself the very divisions on the basis of family or region that it
claimed to transcend.
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