The Xianbei from southeast Mongolia were the first foreign sovereignty over North China since the 4th century. During the 200 years of Xianbei rulership, the cultures of old and new inhabitants – the Han-Chinese, the Xianbei and diverse steppe peoples, the Sogdians and other Central Asians from the west – confronted and competed with one another. This volume is one of the first...(展开全部)

Chinese food is one of the most recognizable and widely consumed cuisines in the world. Almost no town on earth is without a Chinese restaurant of some kind, and Chinese canned, frozen, and preserved foods are available in shops from Nairobi to Quito. But the particulars of Chinese cuisine vary widely from place to place as its major ingredients and techniques have been adapted...(展开全部)

Chinese food is one of the most recognizable and widely consumed cuisines in the world. Almost no town on earth is without a Chinese restaurant of some kind, and Chinese canned, frozen, and preserved foods are available in shops from Nairobi to Quito. But the particulars of Chinese cuisine vary widely from place to place as its major ingredients and techniques have been adapted...(展开全部)

Through close examination of a set of educational works discovered among the Dunhuang manuscripts, this book presents new insights into the literary training undertaken by the elite of medieval China. In their contents and structures, these works tell us what parts of the literary and cultural inheritance the elite were expected to learn and how they learned them. The material ...(展开全部)

Andrew Eisenberg, Ph.D. (1991) in History, University of Washington, Seattle, is Associate Professor of History at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. He has published essays on Classical Chinese political history in the journals T'ang Studies, Theory and Society, and T'oung Pao. This is his first full length monograph.

For those to whom "Taoism" is the Tao te ching and Chuang-tzu, nothing could seem more foreign to Taoism than bureaucracy. In these two classics, the Way (tao) is everything that bureaucracy is not: it is nonhierarchical, undifferentiated, ineffable, spontaneous. The bureaucratic spirit pertains rather to stuffy Confucians, who foolishly imagine that the way to fulfill human po...(展开全部)

By the middle of the third century B.C.E. in China there were individuals who sought to become transcendents (xian)--deathless, godlike beings endowed with supernormal powers. This quest for transcendence became a major form of religious expression and helped lay the foundation on which the first Daoist religion was built. Both xian and those who aspired to this exalted status ...(展开全部)

Fiefs and Vassals has changed our view of the medieval world. It offers a fundamental challenge to orthodox conceptions of feudalism. Susan Reynolds argues that the concepts of the fief and of vassalage, as understood by historians of medieval Europe, were constructed by post-medieval scholars from the works of medieval academic lawyers and tha they provide a bad guide to the r...(展开全部)

The first millennium saw a rich and distinctive artistic tradition form in Europe. While books had long been central to the Christian religious tradition, education, and culture, they now became an important artistic medium, sometimes decorated with brilliant colours and precious metals. Lawrence Nees explores issues of artist patronage, craftsmanship, holy men and women, monas...(展开全部)

This is the first study in a Western language devoted to one of the most visually distinctive features of the landscape in China--moya or moya shike, texts carved into granite boulders and cliffs that are part of the natural terrain at thousands of sites of historic or scenic interest. These inscriptions, carved in large, bold characters, served as a vast repository of texts pr...(展开全部)