History

The Bronze Age state of the Western Zhou represented a ground-breaking period in Chinese culture and civilization. This book addresses the complex relationship between geography and political power within the context of the crisis and fall of that state between 1045 771 B.C. Drawing on the latest archaeological discoveries, the book shows how inscribed bronze vessels can be used to reveal changes in the political space of the period, and explores literary and geographical evidence to produce a coherent understanding of the Bronze Age past. By taking an interdisciplinary approach which embraces archaeology, history and geography, the book thoroughly reinterprets late Western Zhou history and probes the causes of its gradual decline and eventual fall. Supported through out by maps created from the most current GIS datasets and by numerous on-site photographs, Landscape and Power in Early China gives significant new insights into this important Bronze Age society.

This book explores the roles of agricultural development and advancing social complexity in the processes of state formation in China. Over a period of about 10,000 years, it follows evolutionary trajectories of society from the last Paleolithic hunting-gathering groups, through Neolithic farming villages, and on to the Bronze Age Shang dynasty in the latter half of the second millennium BC. Li Liu and Xingcan Chen demonstrate that sociopolitical evolution was multicentric and shaped by inter-polity factionalism and competition, as well as by the many material technologies introduced from other parts of the world. The book illustrates how ancient Chinese societies were transformed during this period from simple to complex, tribal to urban, and preliterate to literate.

First published in 1931. This re-issues the edition of 1972. This translation and Wilhelm's invaluable commentaries provide a concise and readable survey of Confucius, the man and his teachings. This volume translates The Life of Confucius from an ancient Chinese text, the Shih Chi, or The Historical Records by Sse-Ma Ch'ien, dating from the turn of the second century B.C.

The Shang Dynasty 1523-1027 BC The Shang is the earliest Chinese dynasty for which we have written evidence.

This is the first of two volumes in this major Cambridge history dealing with the decline of the Ch'ing empire. It opens with a survey of the Ch'ing empire in China and Inner Asia at its height, in about 1800. Contributors study the complex interplay of foreign invasion, domestic rebellion and Ch'ing decline and restoration. Special reference is made to the Peking administration, the Canton trade and the early treaty system, the Taiping, Nien and other rebellions, and the dynasty's survival in uneasy cooperation with the British, Russian, French, American and other invaders. Each chapter is written by a specialist from the international community of sinological scholars. No knowledge of Chinese is necessary; for readers with Chinese, proper names and terms are identified with their characters in the glossary, and full references to Chinese, Japanese and other works are given in the bibliographies. Numerous maps illustrate the text, and there are a bibliographical essays describing the source materials on which each author's account is based.

Many Chinese philosophic concepts derive from an ancient cosmology. This work is the first reconstructions of the mythic thought of the Shang Dynasty (ca. 1700- 1100 B.C.) which laid the foundation for later Chinese patterns of thought. Allan regards the myth, cosmology, divination, sacrificial ritual, and art of the Shang as different manifestations of a common religious system and each is examined in turn, building up a coherent and consistent picture. Although primarily concerned with the Shang, this work also describes the manner in which Shang thought was transformed in the later textual tradition.

This concise book emphasises Chinese cultural history while also covering political and economic history. It is introductory in both style and content, and the organization is kept as simple as possible, brief coverage of each major Chinese dynasty or other discrete period is treated in a separate chapter. Coverage includes recent developments in China, up to and including the massacre at Tiananmen Square. Time-lines, charts, or key dates area at the beginning of chapters. Chinese names are printed in Pinyin with Wade-Giles in parentheses.

This book is a study of the production and use of iron and steel in China up to the second century B.C., and simultaneously a methodological study of the reconciliation of archaeological and written sources in Chinese cultural history.An introductory chapter describes and discusses the available sources and their use, gives a brief outline of early Chinese archaeology and history, and develops certain important themes, especially the interaction of North and South in early China. Further chapters consider the invention of iron in a barbarian culture of southeast China, its spread to the area of Chinese culture, and the development of a large-scale iron industry in the third century B.C. The technology of iron production in early China is considered in two chapters, on the microstructures of wrought and cast iron artifacts.

The Yellow River valley of China, during the period ca. 7000-1500, saw the transformation of egalitarian societies into stratified chiefdoms giving rise to early states. This book examines that transformation, emphasizing the interplay of many factors affecting these processes, such as climatic fluctuation, population movements, inter-group competition, warfare, and long-distance exchange of valuables.

Ancient Central China provides an up-to-date synthesis of archaeological discoveries in the upper and middle Yangzi River region of China, including the Three Gorges Dam reservoir zone. It focuses on the Late Neolithic (late third millennium BC) through the end of the Bronze Age (late first millennium BC) and considers regional and interregional cultural relationships in light of anthropological models of landscape. Rowan K. Flad and Pochan Chen show that centers and peripheries of political, economic, and ritual activities were not coincident, and that politically peripheral regions such as the Three Gorges were crucial hubs in interregional economic networks, particularly related to prehistoric salt production. The book provides detailed discussions of recent archaeological discoveries and data from the Chengdu Plain, Three Gorges, and Hubei to illustrate how these various components of regional landscape were configured across Central China

This comprehensive history of the northern frontier of China through the first millennium B.C. details the formation of two increasingly distinct cultural areas: the sedentary Chinese and the northern nomads. Nicola Di Cosmo explores the tensions existing between these two worlds as they became progressively more polarized, with the eventual creation of the nomadic Hsiung-nu empire in the north, and of the Chinese empire in the south. Di Cosmo investigates the origins of the antagonism between early China and its "barbarian" neighbors.

Early Chinese ideas about the construction of an ordered human space received narrative form in a set of stories dealing with the rescue of the world and its inhabitants from a universal flood. This book demonstrates how early Chinese stories of the re-creation of the world from a watery chaos provided principles underlying such fundamental units as the state, lineage, the married couple, and even the human body. These myths also supplied a charter for the major political and social institutions of Warring States (481 221 BC) and early imperial (220 BC AD 220) China. In some versions of the tales, the flood was triggered by rebellion, while other versions linked the taming of the flood with the creation of the institution of a lineage, and still others linked the taming to the process in which the divided principles of the masculine and the feminine were joined in the married couple to produce an ordered household. While availing themselves of earlier stories and of central religious rituals of the period, these myths transformed earlier divinities or animal spirits into rulers or ministers and provided both etiologies and legitimation for the emerging political and social institutions that culminated in the creation of a unitary empire.

This richly illustrated book provides a glimpse into the belief system and the material wealth of the social elite in pre-Imperial China through a close analysis of tomb contents and excavated bamboo texts.