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A priceless golden chalice has been stolen from Fergus McSwaggers,
fearsome chief of the squelchy Bog Islands ... and he wants it
back! Can Flynn and the crew of the Black Hound solve their most
dangerous case yet, battling deadly ice pirates, outsmarting
squabbling clans, and facing the scariest beast of all the Seven
Seas, the monstrous, cat-like Mogdrod?
Each chapter of this collection addresses a problem in Chinese
history that is both interesting and important, as well as offering
new ideas and interpretations, plus a methodological example that
might inspire other scholars. There is a wide temporal span among
the chapters, which take in early, medieval, and late imperial
China. There is also a broad range of topics covered, including
gender, society, archaeology, historiography, demography,
intellectual thought, art, science, and technology. One chapter
introduces the use of a kind of data completely new to the field of
Chinese studies and develops the combination of old and new methods
required to make sense of them, and the findings offer new
challenges to economic, social, and medical historians. Another
chapter invites us to rethink the reasons why "the woman question"
emerged so suddenly, and to ask how conditions changed after 1898
to so radically alter views of women's place. Yet another
reconsiders the rapid industrialization of Europe in the nineteenth
century in light of the slower but equally extraordinary rise of
modern Chinese machine-driven industry after 1860. The collective
nature of this volume and the variety of its approaches and topics,
plus the high quality of each chapter, make it accessible to
scholars in a wide range of intellectual fields who may use from
one to all chapters.
This book is an innovative attempt to convey something of how it
has felt since the early nineteenth century to be Chinese. It is
based on the assumption that people live their lives in stories, or
as if they themselves were in stories--stories that are largely a
social inheritance but are also in some measure self-created or at
least continually adapted, edited, or extended.
The author describes and interprets some of the most important
stories through which the Chinese have lived their lives in the
last two hundred years and their understanding of them. He shows
how largely forgotten works of popular literature, novels and poems
in particular, can admit the reader to a number of different
emotional worlds. Together they suggest that there is no such thing
as "the" Chinese story, let alone mind, but rather a historical
palimpsest of extraordinary and often internally contradictory
complexity.
The book begins with an examination of Li Ruzhen's "Destinies of
the Flowers in the Mirror, " which reveals a microcosm of the
educated Chinese world predating major Western influences.
Balancing this emphasis on the elite are the poems collected by
Zhang Yingchang in "Our Dynasty's Bell of Poesy, " which portray
the universe of peasants, women, artisans, soldiers, and prisoners.
A bestseller of the 1930's, "Tides in the Human Sea, " shows the
'crisis of absurdity' that arises when feelings no longer coincide
with inherited patterns of behavior as modernization begins to take
hold. Hao Ran's "Children of the Western Sands, " a popular
Communist work of the early 1970's, allows us to be drawn into at
least a momentary empathy with the idealism of the Maoist faithful.
Almost as different as can be imagined is "The Bastard, " by Sima
Zhongyuan, one of Taiwan's most widely read writers. Its characters
interpret the Communist revolution in terms derived from
traditional Chinese religion, as a deserved punishment inflicted on
the Chinese for the filthy impropriety of their sexual conduct.
The final work considered is a book of essays, "A Commonplace
Fellow, " by Yuan Ze'nan, a Chinese-American writer who has reached
the point where his Chineseness has all but vanished, and who is
consciously exploring its disappearance.
This book is an innovative attempt to convey something of how it
has felt since the early nineteenth century to be Chinese. It is
based on the assumption that people live their lives in stories, or
as if they themselves were in stories--stories that are largely a
social inheritance but are also in some measure self-created or at
least continually adapted, edited, or extended.
The author describes and interprets some of the most important
stories through which the Chinese have lived their lives in the
last two hundred years and their understanding of them. He shows
how largely forgotten works of popular literature, novels and poems
in particular, can admit the reader to a number of different
emotional worlds. Together they suggest that there is no such thing
as "the" Chinese story, let alone mind, but rather a historical
palimpsest of extraordinary and often internally contradictory
complexity.
The book begins with an examination of Li Ruzhen's "Destinies of
the Flowers in the Mirror, " which reveals a microcosm of the
educated Chinese world predating major Western influences.
Balancing this emphasis on the elite are the poems collected by
Zhang Yingchang in "Our Dynasty's Bell of Poesy, " which portray
the universe of peasants, women, artisans, soldiers, and prisoners.
A bestseller of the 1930's, "Tides in the Human Sea, " shows the
'crisis of absurdity' that arises when feelings no longer coincide
with inherited patterns of behavior as modernization begins to take
hold. Hao Ran's "Children of the Western Sands, " a popular
Communist work of the early 1970's, allows us to be drawn into at
least a momentary empathy with the idealism of the Maoist faithful.
Almost as different as can be imagined is "The Bastard, " by Sima
Zhongyuan, one of Taiwan's most widely read writers. Its characters
interpret the Communist revolution in terms derived from
traditional Chinese religion, as a deserved punishment inflicted on
the Chinese for the filthy impropriety of their sexual conduct.
The final work considered is a book of essays, "A Commonplace
Fellow, " by Yuan Ze'nan, a Chinese-American writer who has reached
the point where his Chineseness has all but vanished, and who is
consciously exploring its disappearance.
A satisfactory comprehensive history of the social and economic
development of pre-modern China, the largest country in the world
in terms of population, and with a documentary record covering
three millennia, is still far from possible. The present work is
only an attempt to disengage the major themes that seem to be of
relevance to our understanding of China today. In particular, this
volume studies three questions. Why did the Chinese Empire stay
together when the Roman Empire, and every other empire of antiquity
of the middle ages, ultimately collapsed? What were the causes of
the medieval revolution which made the Chinese economy after about
1100 the most advanced in the world? And why did China after about
1350 fail to maintain her earlier pace of technological advance
while still, in many respects, advancing economically? The three
sections of the book deal with these problems in turn but the
division of a subject matter is to some extent only one of
convenience. These topics are so interrelated that, in the last
analysis, none of them can be considered in isolation from the
others.
Meet Captain John Hamish Watkins and his pirate crew: Briggs the
quartermaster, Fishbreath the cook, Master Hudson the ship's Bosun,
the riggers Drudger, Snitch and Dedweard - oh and last but not
least Red, the girl rigger who becomes Flynn's friend and ally on
board this unruly ship! Flynn's first case is a summons for help
from Miss Kristina Wrinkly, curator of the Gypshun museum. There's
been a break-in, and priceless, ancient artefacts have been stolen
including the irreplaceable sceptre of the Pharaohs!
This landmark account of China's environmental history, written by
an internationally pre-eminent China specialist, "should stand for
decades to come as a unique statement on motives, processes,
perceptions and consequences of environmental change in China."
(Jennifer L. Mnookin, American Scientist) This is the first
environmental history of China during the three thousand years for
which there are written records. It is also a treasure trove of
literary, political, aesthetic, scientific, and religious sources,
which allow the reader direct access to the views and feelings of
the Chinese people toward their environment and their landscape.
Elvin chronicles the spread of the Chinese style of farming that
eliminated the habitat of the elephants that populated the country
alongside much of its original wildlife; the destruction of most of
the forests; the impact of war on the environmental transformation
of the landscape; and the re-engineering of the countryside through
water-control systems, some of gigantic size. He documents the
histories of three contrasting localities within China to show how
ecological dynamics defined the lives of the inhabitants. And he
shows that China in the eighteenth century, on the eve of the
modern era, was probably more environmentally degraded than
northwestern Europe around this time. Indispensable for its new
perspective on long-term Chinese history and its explanation of the
roots of China's present-day environmental crisis, this book opens
a door into the Chinese past.
The full dimensions of the medieval Chinese economic revolution are
still almost unknown to economic historians in the Western world,
and the manifold problems that it raises for accepted theories of
economic development have hardly begun to be systematically
considered. Japanese scholars have been the pioneers in opening up
this field, and Professor Shiba's Commerce and Society in Sung
China is among the most recent and most impressive fruits of their
labors. For the first time it is possible to be relatively
confident, as the result of the author's systematic exploitation of
an enormous range of source materials, about the parts played by
transport, trade, business organization and urbanization in this
revolution. It is hardly necessary to labor the significance of the
advance. China's was beyond any reasonable doubt the most developed
economy in the medieval world, and the investigation both of the
causes that made this possible and of those that subsequently
prevented a take-off into sustained growth is among the most
pressing tasks waiting to be accomplished before any general theory
of economic development, solidly grounded in comparative historical
analysis, becomes possible.
The first comprehensive survey of Chinese environmental history, this book crystallizes a new field of scholarship that studies the creation of distinct environments as a result of the interaction of human social systems with the natural world. Pioneering essays explore new methodologies of historical environmental research, comparisons of China with the West and Japan, and the impact of the early modern ecological transformation on the spread of disease. An indispensable book for those trying to understand the foundations of modern China or the origins of many of contemporary China's most daunting challenges.
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