Tun-huang Popular Narratives presents authoritative translations of four vernacular Chinese stories, taken from fragmentary texts usually referred to as pien-wen or 'transformation texts'. Dating from the late T'ang (618 907) and Five Dynasties (907 959) periods, the texts were discovered early last century in a cave at Tun-huang, in Chinese Central Asia. However, written down in an early colloquial language by semi-literate individuals and posing formidable philological problems, the texts have not been studied critically before. Nevertheless they represent the only surviving primary evidence of a widespread and flourishing world of popular entertainment during these centuries. The tales deal with both religious (mostly Buddhist) and secular themes, and make exciting and vivid reading.

Tun-huang Popular Narratives presents authoritative translations of four vernacular Chinese stories, taken from fragmentary texts usually referred to as pien-wen or 'transformation texts'. Dating from the late T'ang (618???907) and Five Dynasties (907???959) periods, the texts were discovered early last century in a cave at Tun-huang, in Chinese Central Asia. However, written down in an early colloquial language by semi-literate individuals and posing formidable philological problems, the texts have not been studied critically before. Nevertheless they represent the only surviving primary evidence of a widespread and flourishing world of popular entertainment during these centuries. The tales deal with both religious (mostly Buddhist) and secular themes, and make exciting and vivid reading.

Similar in size and in duration, the Chinese and the Roman empires ruled half the world's population at the time of their co-existence. But what did they know about each other? In China and the Roman Orient Friedrich Hirth uses linguistic, geographical and historical analysis of ancient Chinese records to reconstruct the ancient trade routes used by the Chinese and to show what knowledge they had of the Roman Empire. His careful research on the original Chinese sources also tells us much about the geography, history and commerce of the period. China and the Roman Orient quickly established itself as a landmark work. It remains an important and much cited work but is now scarce. This new edition contains a new introduction by leading contemporary scholar Victor Mair, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, USA

Watered with the blood and tears of countless poets and authors and naturally expressing the most heartfelt emotions of ancient peoples, poems of mourning and texts of lament stand out in classical Chinese literature as brilliant and unique. Composed and celebrated over 3000 years, they are central to the Chinese literary tradition but have been largely unknown to English readers. Including 100 major pieces by leading literary figures from 800 BCE - 1800, this is the first English anthology of classic Chinese poems of mourning and texts of sacrificial orations. With annotated translations by leading scholars and reading guides accompanying each piece, this book reveals a powerful literary heritage to students and serious readers of Chinese literature, history and civilization.

The story of Mulian rescuing his mother's soul from hell has evolved as a narrative over several centuries in China, especially in the baojuan (precious scrolls) genre. This genre, a prosimetric narrative in vernacular language, first appeared around the fourteenth century and endures as a living tradition. In exploring the evolution of the Mulian story, Rostislav Berezkin illuminates changes in the literary and religious characteristics of the genre. He also examines material from other forms of Chinese literature and from modern performances of baojuan, tracing their transformation from tools of Buddhist proselytizing to sectarian propaganda to folk ritualized storytelling. Ultimately, he reveals the special features of baojuan as a type of performance literature that had its foundations in multiple literary traditions.

A new, landmark translation ofone of the most popular works of world literture, this edition of the Tao Te Ching is based on the newly discovered Ma-wang-tui manuscripts. Illustrated ith ten woodcuts.

With commentary and annotations throughout, Ming Dynasty Tales: A Guided Reader presents for the first time in English 10 key stories from China's Ming Dynasty era. Casting new light on this significant period in Chinese literary history, these tales bring Ming era China vividly to life, from its chaotic beginnings to its imperial heyday. As well as bearing witness to social change across the 100-year life of the Yuan Dynasty from 1260 to 1368, these tales tackle key themes of war and peace and Confucian values of loyalty, filiality, chastity, and righteousness.

The Prehistory of the Silk Road E. E. Kuzmina Edited by Victor H. Mair "A major advance in the field of the early history and archaeology of central Asia."--Nicola Di Cosmo, Institute for Advanced Study In ancient and medieval times, the Silk Road was of great importance to the transport of peoples, goods, and ideas between the East and the West. A vast network of trade routes, it connected the diverse geographies and populations of China, the Eurasian Steppe, Central Asia, India, Western Asia, and Europe. Although its main use was for importing silk from China, traders moving in the opposite direction carried to China jewelry, glassware, and other exotic goods from the Mediterranean, jade from Khotan, and horses and furs from the nomads of the Steppe. In both directions, technology and ideologies were transmitted. The Silk Road brought together the achievements of the different peoples of Eurasia to advance the Old World as a whole. The majority of the Silk Road routes passed through the Eurasian Steppe, whose nomadic people were participants and mediators in its economic and cultural exchanges. Until now, the origins of these routes and relationships have not been examined in great detail. In "The Prehistory of the Silk Road," E. E. Kuzmina, renowned Russian archaeologist, looks at the history of this crucial area before the formal establishment of Silk Road trade and diplomacy. From the late Neolithic period to the early Bronze Age, Kuzmina traces the evolution of the material culture of the Steppe and the contact between civilizations that proved critical to the development of the widespread trade that would follow, including nomadic migrations, the domestication and use of the horse and the camel, and the spread of wheeled transport. "The Prehistory of the Silk Road" combines detailed research in archaeology with evidence from physical anthropology, linguistics, and other fields, incorporating both primary and secondary sources from a range of languages, including a vast accumulation of Russian-language scholarship largely untapped in the West. The book is complemented by an extensive bibliography that will be of great use to scholars. E. E. Kuzmina is Chief Research Officer at the Russian Institute for Cultural Researches of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation and the Russian Academy of Sciences. She is the author of many books and has led numerous archaeological expeditions in Central Asia. Victor H. Mair is Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the coauthor of "The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West." Encounters with Asia 2007 264 pages 6 x 9 73 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-4041-2 Cloth $65.00s 42.50 World Rights Archaeology, Asian Studies

This volume is the first complete English rendition of the 45 famous tales in the monumental anthology masterfully selected and edited by Lu Xun (1881-1936). It is the most distinctive, authoritative, and influential chuanqi collection thus far, and many of the pieces are rendered for the first time. This is an important contribution to the field of Chinese studies in the English-speaking world.

The story of Mulian rescuing his mother’s soul from hell has evolved as a narrative over several centuries in China, especially in the baojuan (precious scrolls) genre. This genre, a prosimetric narrative in vernacular language, first appeared around the fourteenth century and endures as a living tradition. In exploring the evolution of the Mulian story, Rostislav Berezkin illuminates changes in the literary and religious characteristics of the genre. He also examines material from other forms of Chinese literature and from modern performances of baojuan, tracing their transformation from tools of Buddhist proselytizing to sectarian propaganda to folk ritualized storytelling. Ultimately, he reveals the special features of baojuan as a type of performance literature that had its foundations in multiple literary traditions.

With commentary and annotations throughout, Ming Dynasty Tales: A Guided Reader presents for the first time in English 10 key stories from China's Ming Dynasty era. Casting new light on this significant period in Chinese literary history, these tales bring Ming era China vividly to life, from its chaotic beginnings to its imperial heyday. As well as bearing witness to social change across the 100-year life of the Yuan Dynasty from 1260 to 1368, these tales tackle key themes of war and peace and Confucian values of loyalty, filiality, chastity, and righteousness.

This book is a valuable collection of essays by renowned Asian studies scholar Victor H. Mair. Compiled by Rebecca Shuang Fu, Matthew Anderson, Xiang Wan, and Sophie Ling-Chia Wei, it provides a window into Mair's vast array of scholarly works, which are influential and well known for their broad scope. This collection connects Mair's works from phases of his career to show its trajectory and development. Chapters 1 to 3 reflect his comprehensive and interdisciplinary training in Chinese literature and Indology. From chapter 4 onwards, Mair's much-lauded insightful discussions on the interactions between China and other cultures are presented. The last 3 chapters demonstrate how Mair's research successfully branched out from philology, making significant contributions to various fields, including art, archaeology, and philosophy. This book is essential for scholars in Asian studies.

This book is a valuable collection of essays by renowned Asian studies scholar Victor H. Mair. Compiled by Rebecca Shuang Fu, Matthew Anderson, Xiang Wan, and Sophie Ling-Chia Wei, it provides a window into Mair's vast array of scholarly works, which are influential and well known for their broad scope. This collection connects Mair's works from phases of his career to show its trajectory and development. Chapters 1 to 3 reflect his comprehensive and interdisciplinary training in Chinese literature and Indology. From chapter 4 onwards, Mair's much-lauded insightful discussions on the interactions between China and other cultures are presented. The last 3 chapters demonstrate how Mair's research successfully branched out from philology, making significant contributions to various fields, including art, archaeology, and philosophy. This book is essential for scholars in Asian studies.

This book discusses erotic and magical goddesses and heroines in several ancient cultures, from the Near East and Asia, and throughout ancient Europe; in prehistoric and early historic iconography, their magical qualities are often indicated by a magical dance or stance. It is a look at female display figures both cross-culturally and cross-temporally, through texts and iconography, beginning with figures depicted in very early Neolithic Anatolia, early and middle Neolithic southeast Europe--Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia--continuing through the late Neolithic in East Asia, and into early historic Greece, India, and Ireland, and elsewhere across the world. These very similar female figures were depicted in Anatolia, Europe, Southern Asia, and East Asia, in a broad chronological sweep, beginning with the pre-pottery Neolithic, ca. 9000 BCE, and existing from the beginning of the second millennium of this era up to the present era. This book demonstrates the extraordinary similarities, in a broad geographic range, of depictions and descriptions of magical female figures who give fertility and strength to the peoples of their cultures by means of their magical erotic powers. This book uniquely contains translations of texts which describe these ancient female figures, from a multitude of Indo-European, Near Eastern, and East Asian works, a feat only possible given the authors' formidable combined linguistic expertise in over thirty languages. The book contains many photographs of these geographically different, but functionally and artistically similar, female figures. Many current books (academic and otherwise) explore some of the female figures the authors discuss in their book, but such a wide-ranging cross-cultural and cross-temporal view of this genre of female figures has never been undertaken until now. The "sexual" display of these female figures reflects the huge numinosity of the prehistoric divine feminine, and of her magical genitalia. The functions of fertility and apotropaia, which count among the functions of the early historic display and dancing figures, grow out of this numinosity and reflect the belief in and honoring of the powers of the ancient divine feminine.

Similar in size and in duration, the Chinese and the Roman empires ruled half the world's population at the time of their co-existence. But what did they know about each other? In China and the Roman Orient Friedrich Hirth uses linguistic, geographical and historical analysis of ancient Chinese records to reconstruct the ancient trade routes used by the Chinese and to show what knowledge they had of the Roman Empire. His careful research on the original Chinese sources also tells us much about the geography, history and commerce of the period. China and the Roman Orient quickly established itself as a landmark work. It remains an important and much cited work but is now scarce. This new edition contains a new introduction by leading contemporary scholar Victor Mair, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, USA

Four Testaments brings together four foundational texts from world religions-the Tao Te Ching, Dhammapada, Analects of Confucius, and Bhagavad Gita-inviting readers to experience them in full, to explore possible points of connection and divergence, and to better understand people who practice these traditions. Following Brian Arthur Brown's award-winning Three Testaments: Torah, Gospel, Quran, this volume of Four Testaments features essays by esteemed scholars to introduce readers to each tradition and text, as well as commentary on unexpected ways the ancient Zoroastrian tradition might connect Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Hinduism, along with the Abrahamic faiths. Four Testaments aims to foster deeper religious understanding in our interconnected and contentious world.

At a time when China-Southeast Asia relationships are undergoing profound changes, it is pleasing to have a volume which examines the interactions between China and the polities and societies to the south through time.With multiple aims of exploring the relations between northern Chinese cultures and those of the south, examining the cultural plurality of areas which are today parts of Southern China, and illuminating the relations between Sinitic and non-Sinitic societies, the volume is broad in concept and content.Within these extensive rubrics, this edited collection further interrogates the nature of Asian polities and their historiography, the constitution of Chineseness, imperial China's southern expansions, cultural hybridity, economic relations, regional systems and ethnic interactions across East Asia.The editors Victor H. Mair and Liam C. Kelley are to be congratulated for bringing together such a wealth of contributions offering nascent interpretations and broad overviews, set within the overarching historical and contemporary contexts provided through Wang Gungwu's introduction" -- Dr Geoffrey Wade, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University

This is the most comprehensive study of "pien-wen" ("transformation texts," i.e., tales of metamorphosis) in any language since the manuscripts were discovered at the beginning of this century in a remote cave complex in northwest China. They are the earliest written vernacular narratives in China and are thus extremely important in the history of Chinese language and literature. Numerous scholarly controversies have surrounded the study of the texts in the last three-quarters of a century; this volume seeks to resolve some of them -- the extent, origins, and formal characteristics of the texts, the meaning of "pien-wen," the identity of the authors who composed these popular narratives and the describes who copied them, the relationship of the texts to oral performance, and the reasons for the apparently sudden demise of the genre around the beginning of the Sung dynasty. Mair's is a multi-disciplinary study that integrates findings from religious, literary, linguistic, sociological, and historical materials, carried out with philological rigor. It includes an extensive bibliography of relevant sources in many languages.

The Hawai'i Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture is a collection of more than ninety primary sources - all but a few of which were translated specifically for this volume - of cultural significance from the Bronze Age to the turn of the twentieth century. They take into account virtually every aspect of traditional culture, including sources from the non-Sinitic ethnic minorities.

Four Testaments brings together four foundational texts from world religions-the Tao Te Ching, Dhammapada, Analects of Confucius, and Bhagavad Gita-inviting readers to experience them in full, to explore possible points of connection and divergence, and to better understand people who practice these traditions. Following Brian Arthur Brown's award-winning Three Testaments: Torah, Gospel, Quran, this volume of Four Testaments features essays by esteemed scholars to introduce readers to each tradition and text, as well as commentary on unexpected ways the ancient Zoroastrian tradition might connect Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Hinduism, as well as the Abrahamic faiths. Four Testaments aims to foster deeper religious understanding in our interconnected and contentious world.