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 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?

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.

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!

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.

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China series. For nearly fifty years, Needham and his collaborators have revealed the ideals, concepts and achievements of China's scientific and technological traditions from the earliest times to about 1800 through this great enterprise. During his long working lifetime, Needham kept in draft various essays, some written with collaborators, in which he set out his broad views on the Chinese social and historical context. These essays, edited by one of his closest collaborators, Kenneth Robinson, are contained in the present volume. A reading of this material makes it possible to reconstruct the assumptions and problematics that underpinned and drove the Needham project throughout the nearly one half century during which he was at the helm. The documents gathered here reveal the intellectual foundations of one of the greatest scholarly enterprises of the twentieth century.

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.

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.