Calligraphy and Bureaucratic Administration in Tang China (618-907) PDF Download

Author: Pietro De Laurentis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 23

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Author: Pietro De Laurentis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000488586
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 479

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Book Description
This is a study of the earliest and finest collated inscription in the history of Chinese calligraphy, the Ji Wang shengjiao xu 集王聖教序 (Preface to the Sacred Teaching Scriptures Translated by Xuanzang in Wang Xizhi’s Collated Characters), which was erected on January 1, 673. The stele records the two texts written by the Tang emperors Taizong (599–649) and Gaozong (628–683) in honor of the monk Xuanzang (d. 664) and the Buddhist scripture Xin jing (Heart Sutra), collated in the semi-cursive characters of the great master of Chinese calligraphy, Wang Xizhi (303–361). It is thus a Buddhist inscription that combines Buddhist authority, political power, and artistic charm in one single monument. The present book reconstructs the multifaceted context in which the stele was devised, aiming at highlighting the specific role calligraphy played in the propagation and protection of Buddhism in medieval China.

Author: Andrea Ercolani
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110428717
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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The book is the third and concluding part of the investigation on Submerged literature in ancient Greece and beyond. The book expands the inquiry to a comparative perspective, in order to test the validity and usefulness of the hermeneutical approach in other fields and cultures. The comparative case studies deal with gnostic text, Qumran texts, the Hebrew Bible, Early Christianity, Cuneiform Texts, Arabic-Islamic literature, ancient Rome, Medieval China, and contemporary southern Italy. The volume tackles themes and questions relating to author and authorship, cultural translation and transmission, the interaction between orality and literacy, myth and folktale. A particular emphasis is given to anthropological themes and methods. In this vein, the book further explores dynamics of emergence and submersion in ancient Greece, including cultural trends promoted respectively by Sparta and Athens. The volume provides the reader with a wide range of tools and methodological suggestions to reconstruct literary phenomena and cultural processes in a given historical epoch and context, as well as offering new insights for both classical and comparative studies.

Author: Alexei Kamran Ditter
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 584

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Author: Dorothy Perkins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135935629
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 673

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Presents a representative cross-section of entries on all aspects of the history and culture of China. Alphabetically organized, the entries include* major cities and provinces* historical eras and figures* government and politics* economics* religion* language and the writing system* food and customs* sports and martial arts* crafts and architecture* important Chinese figures outside of mainland China* important Westerners in China.

Author: Ichisada Miyazaki
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300026399
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Written by one of the foremost historians of Chinese institutions, this book focuses on China's civil service examination system in its final and most elaborate phase during the Ch'ing dynasty. All aspects of this labyrinthine system are explored: the types of questions, the style and form in which they were to be answered, the problem of cheating, and the psychological and financial burdens of the candidates, the rewards of the successful and the plight of those who failed. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including Chinese novels, short stories, and plays, this thought provoking and entertaining book brings to vivid life the testing structure that supplied China's government bureaucracy for almost fourteen hundred years. "Professor Miyazaki's informative work is concerned with a system. . . that was, in effect, . . . the basic institution of Chinese political life, the real pillar which supported the imperial monarchy, the effective vehicle for the aspirations and ambitions of the ruling class. Imperial China without the examination system for the past thousand years and more would have developed in an entirely different way and might not have endured as the continuing form of government over a huge empire."--Pacific Affairs "The most comprehensive narrative treatment in any language of [this] enduring achievement of Chinese civilization."--American Historical Review

Author: Amalia E. Gnanadesikan
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444359851
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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In a world of rapid technological advancements, it can be easy to forget that writing is the original Information Technology, created to transcend the limitations of human memory and to defy time and space. The Writing Revolution picks apart the development of this communication tool to show how it has conquered the world. Explores how writing has liberated the world, making possible everything from complex bureaucracy, literature, and science, to instruction manuals and love letters Draws on an engaging range of examples, from the first cuneiform clay tablet, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Japanese syllabaries, to the printing press and the text messaging Weaves together ideas from a number of fields, including history, cultural studies and archaeology, as well as linguistics and literature, to create an interdisciplinary volume Traces the origins of each of the world’s major written traditions, along with their applications, adaptations, and cultural influences

Author: Yongnian Zheng
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000642399
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 728

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In this important and hugely ambitious book, one of the world’s leading political scientists working on China demonstrates how Western views of China are flawed because the long tradition of Western scholarship studying China views China from the Western philosophical and intellectual perspective rather than viewing China on its own terms through the lens of China’s own long-established and reputable philosophical and intellectual tradition. Providing a deep analysis of Western scholarship on China, including work from Leibniz to Marx to Weber and then to Wittfogel, and a thorough account of the evolution of China’s own thinking about governance as expressed in the practices of successive Chinese dynasties, the book goes on to examine how the current Chinese body politic fits with and is the natural outcome of China’s own long, well-thought-through and well-practiced intellectual consideration of what the nature of civilized governance should be. By focusing on philosophical and intellectual approaches rather than on theoretical or methodological ones, the book shows how the huge and increasing disconnect between non-Chinese views of China and Chinese ones has come about.

Author: Mark Edward Lewis
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067403306X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
The Tang dynasty is often called China’s “golden age,” a period of commercial, religious, and cultural connections from Korea and Japan to the Persian Gulf, and a time of unsurpassed literary creativity. Mark Lewis captures a dynamic era in which the empire reached its greatest geographical extent under Chinese rule, painting and ceramic arts flourished, women played a major role both as rulers and in the economy, and China produced its finest lyric poets in Wang Wei, Li Bo, and Du Fu. The Chinese engaged in extensive trade on sea and land. Merchants from Inner Asia settled in the capital, while Chinese entrepreneurs set off for the wider world, the beginning of a global diaspora. The emergence of an economically and culturally dominant south that was controlled from a northern capital set a pattern for the rest of Chinese imperial history. Poems celebrated the glories of the capital, meditated on individual loneliness in its midst, and described heroic young men and beautiful women who filled city streets and bars. Despite the romantic aura attached to the Tang, it was not a time of unending peace. In 756, General An Lushan led a revolt that shook the country to its core, weakening the government to such a degree that by the early tenth century, regional warlordism gripped many areas, heralding the decline of the Great Tang.

Author: Maddison Angus
Publisher: OECD Publishing
ISBN: 9264163557
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
The study provides a major reassessment of the scale and scope of China’s resurgence over the past half century, employing quantitative measurement techniques which are standard practice in OECD countries, but which have not hitherto been available for China.