Yang Tinghe: A Political Life in the Mid-Ming Court PDF Download

Author: Aaron Throness
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004682376
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

View

Book Description
Who was Yang Tinghe? Despite being one of Ming China’s most eminent officials, Yang and his career have long eluded scholarly study in the West. In this volume, Aaron Throness engages a trove of untapped Ming sources and secondary scholarship to recount Yang Tinghe’s political life, and in unprecedented detail. Throness explores how Yang, a pragmatic politician and conservative Confucian, rose through the bureaucracy and responded to dire threats to the Ming court from within and without. He also traces Yang’s meteoric rise to power, the clashes that occasioned his downfall, and his apotheosis as dynastic savior. Through Yang Tinghe’s successes, struggles, and failures this political biography offers a critical appraisal of both the man and his times.

Author: David M. Robinson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684174740
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 475

View

Book Description
"This collection of essays reveals the Ming court as an arena of competition and negotiation, where a large cast of actors pursued individual and corporate ends, personal agency shaped protocol and style, and diverse people, goods, and tastes converged. Rather than observing an immutable set of traditions, court culture underwent frequent reinterpretation and rearticulation, processes driven by immediate personal imperatives, mediated through social, political, and cultural interaction.The essays address several common themes. First, they rethink previous notions of imperial isolation, instead stressing the court’s myriad ties both to local Beijing society and to the empire as a whole. Second, the court was far from monolithic or static. Palace women, monks, craftsmen, educators, moralists, warriors, eunuchs, foreign envoys, and others strove to advance their interests and forge advantageous relations with the emperor and one another. Finally, these case studies illustrate the importance of individual agency. The founder’s legacy may have formed the warp of court practices and tastes, but the weft varied considerably. Reflecting the complexity of the court, the essays represent a variety of perspectives and disciplines—from intellectual, cultural, military, and political to art history and musicology."

Author: John W. Dardess
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442223782
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221

View

Book Description
This fascinating history uncovers the hidden political world of Ming China, exploring how the most powerful man in mid-sixteenth-century China steered the empire through the worst crises it had ever faced. Distinguished scholar John W. Dardess traces the life of Chief Grand Secretary Xu Jie (1503–1583), the leading politician-statesman in the China of his time. Drawing on years of research, Dardess uses Xu Jie’s extensive letters to officials in the field and reports of conversations with the emperors he served to show just how difficult it was to defend the empire. His correspondence vividly shows how he organized its defenses and shepherded it through the twin crises of raids along the thousands of miles of continental and maritime frontiers in the 1550s and 1560s. The book traces his origins, his rise to power, and his engagement with the leading Confucian school of his time, that of Wang Yangming and his electrifying ethical teachings. Dardess describes how Xu used those teachings to build a following and leverage his way up the Ming bureaucracy. He shows how Xu was able both to suppress corruption and liberalize bureaucratic procedures. At the same time, the book highlights the psychological strain Xu suffered as a result and the vindictive and nearly lethal attacks directed at him after his retirement. Arguing that Xu was instrumental to the survival of the Ming dynasty through a long period of severe stress, Dardess tells his long-neglected story in rich and engrossing detail.

Author: John W. Dardess
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442265604
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

View

Book Description
This important contribution to imperial Chinese history illuminates the basic concerns of the Ming state. Eminent scholar John W. Dardess shows in fascinating detail how Emperor Jiajing and his grand secretaries managed affairs of state and how personal ambition and policy differences combined to animate imperial political life. At the top sat Jiajing, industrious, religious, knowledgeable, ritually pious, but short-tempered and cruel. His chief assistants during his forty-six-year reign were his four successive grand secretaries. First was Zhang Fujing, a hard-minded bureaucratic fighter and ideologue, life coach to Jiajing during his youth. Then came Xia Yan, a superb technocrat who was executed for his part in a major policy dispute. He was followed by Yan Song, a colossally corrupt machine politician who knew how to please his ruler. Finally was Xu Jie, a liberal-minded reformer who put a benign edge on the regime’s final years. Drawing on a treasure trove of the grand secretaries’ personal writings, his narrative brings to life the inner workings of imperial governance, providing detailed descriptions of the challenging problems and crises faced by the largest polity on the face of the earth. Richly researched and engagingly written, this book will be essential reading for scholars and students of Ming China.

Author: Diana Lary
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774840870
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

View

Book Description
The People's Republic of China claims to have 22,000 kilometres of land borders and 18,000 kilometres of coast line. How did this vast country come into being? The state credo describes an ancient process of cultural expansion: border peoples gratefully accept high culture in China and become inalienable parts of the country. And yet, the "centre" had to fight against manifestations of discontent in the border regions, not only to maintain control over the regions themselves, but also to prevent a loss of power at the edges from triggering a general process of regional devolution in the Han Chinese provinces. The essays in this volume look at these issues over a long span of time, questioning whether the process of expansion was a benevolent civilizing mission.

Author: Hailian Chen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004383042
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 822

View

Book Description
In Zinc for Coin and Brass Hailian Chen offers the first comprehensive history of Chinese zinc over the long eighteenth century. This book covers a wide range of topics including Qing China’s political economy, material culture, environment, technology, and society.

Author: F. W. Mote
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674256484
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1132

View

Book Description
This is a history of China for the 900-year time span of the late imperial period. A senior scholar of this epoch, F. W. Mote highlights the personal characteristics of the rulers and dynasties and probes the cultural theme of Chinese adaptations to recurrent alien rule. No other work provides a similar synthesis: generational events, personalities, and the spirit of the age combine to yield a comprehensive history of the civilization, not isolated but shaped by its relation to outsiders. This vast panorama of the civilization of the largest society in human history reveals much about Chinese high and low culture, and the influential role of Confucian philosophical and social ideals. Throughout the Liao Empire, the world of the Song, the Mongol rule, and the early Qing through the Kangxi and Qianlong reigns, culture, ideas, and personalities are richly woven into the fabric of the political order and institutions. This is a monumental work that will stand among the classic accounts of the nature and vibrancy of Chinese civilization before the modern period.

Author: Rafe de Crespigny
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004325204
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 591

View

Book Description
Winner of the 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award The Later Han dynasty, also known as Eastern Han, ruled China for the first two centuries of the Christian era. Comparable in extent and power to the early Roman empire, it dominated east Asia from present-day Vietnam to the Mongolian steppe. Rafe de Crespigny presents here the first full account of this period in Chinese history to be found in a Western language. Commencing with a detailed account of the imperial capital, the history describes the nature of government, the expansion of the Chinese people to the south, the conflicts of scholars and officials with eunuchs at court, and the final collapse which followed the rebellion of the Yellow Turbans and the rise of regional warlords.

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004271368
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 520

View

Book Description
Globalizing Migration History is a major step forward in comparative global migration history. Looking at the period 1500-2000 it presents a new universal method to quantify and qualify cross-cultural migrations, which makes it possible to detect regional trends and explain differences in migration patterns across the globe in the last half millennium. The contributions in this volume, written by specialists on Russia, China, Japan, India, Indonesia and South East Asia, show that such a method offers a fruitful starting point for rigorous comparisons. Furthermore the volume is an explicit invitation to other (economic, cultural, social and political) historians to include migration more explicitly and systematically in their analyses, and thus reach a deeper understanding of the impact of cross-cultural migrations on social change. Contributors are: Sunil Amrith, Ulbe Bosma, Gijs Kessler, Jelle van Lottum, Jan Lucassen, Leo Lucassen, Mireille Mazard, Adam McKeown, Atsushi Ota, Vijaya Ramaswamy,Osamu Saito, Jianfa Shen, Ryuto Shimada, Willard Sunderland, and Yuki Umeno.

Author: Xiaowei Wang
Publisher: FSG Originals
ISBN: 0374721254
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

View

Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "A brilliant and empathetic guide to the far corners of global capitalism." --Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing From FSGO x Logic: stories about rural China, food, and tech that reveal new truths about the globalized world In Blockchain Chicken Farm, the technologist and writer Xiaowei Wang explores the political and social entanglements of technology in rural China. Their discoveries force them to challenge the standard idea that rural culture and people are backward, conservative, and intolerant. Instead, they find that rural China has not only adapted to rapid globalization but has actually innovated the technology we all use today. From pork farmers using AI to produce the perfect pig, to disruptive luxury counterfeits and the political intersections of e-commerce villages, Wang unravels the ties between globalization, technology, agriculture, and commerce in unprecedented fashion. Accompanied by humorous “Sinofuturist” recipes that frame meals as they transform under new technology, Blockchain Chicken Farm is an original and probing look into innovation, connectivity, and collaboration in the digitized rural world. FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.