Offers a comparative and deconstructive reading of the cross-cultural encounter between the Jesuits and their Confucian hosts in late Ming China. The Jesuit mission to China more than four hundred years ago has been the subject of sustained scholarly investigation for centuries. Focusing on the concepts of friendship and hospitality as they were both theorized and practiced by ...(展开全部)

The Yellow River has long been viewed as a symbol of China's cultural and political development, its management traditionally held as a gauge of dynastic power. This work examines long-term efforts to manage the river, and the nature of the bureaucracy created to do the job.

Iconoclastic scholar Li Zhi (1527–1602) was a central figure in the cultural world of the late Ming dynasty. His provocative and controversial words and actions shaped print culture, literary practice, attitudes toward gender, and perspectives on Buddhism and the afterlife. Although banned, his writings were never fully suppressed, because they tapped into issues of vital signi...(展开全部)

In Writing Pirates, Yuanfei Wang connects Chinese literary production to emerging discourses of pirates and the sea. In the late Ming dynasty, so-called “Japanese pirates” raided southeast coastal China. Hideyoshi invaded Korea. Europeans sailed for overseas territories, and Chinese maritime merchants and emigrants founded diaspora communities in Southeast Asia. Travel writings...(展开全部)

An unprecedented passion for saving lives swept through late Ming society, giving rise to charitable institutions that transcended family, class, and religious boundaries. Analyzing lecture transcripts, administrative guidelines, didactic tales, and diaries, Joanna Handlin Smith abandons the facile explanation that charity was a response to poverty and social unrest and examine...(展开全部)

According to imperial edict in pre-modern China, an elementary school was to be established in every village in the empire for any boy to attend. This book looks at how the schools worked, how they changed over time, and who promoted them and why. Over the course of the Ming period (1368-1644), schools were sponsored first by the emperor, then by the central bureaucracy, then b...(展开全部)

In Physiognomy in Ming China: Fortune and the Body, Xing Wang investigates the intellectual and technical contexts in which the knowledge of physiognomy ( xiangshu) was produced and transformed in Ming China (1368-1644 C.E.). Known as a fortune-telling technique via examining the human body and material objects, Xing Wang shows how the construction of the physiognomic body in m...(展开全部)

Sometime before 1579, Zhou Lujing, a professional writer living in a bustling commercial town in southeastern China, published a series of lavishly illustrated books, which constituted the first multigenre painting manuals in Chinese history. Their popularity was immediate and their contents and format were widely reprinted and disseminated in a number of contemporary publicati...(展开全部)

The last century of China's Ming dynasty (1368-1644) saw many troubles and challenges from abroad. Pirates raided the coast, Europeans challenged the traditional world order of the tribute system, and the everlasting threat from the northern steppe people continued to raise concerns for the state. This climate of uncertainty resulted in many Ming literati discussing foreign cou...(展开全部)

Throughout much of history, imperial China has exhibited a seemingly capricious relationship with the sea. At times, it has welcomed commerce and travel across its vast waters with open arms, yet at others, it has sought to completely cordon off the littoral and the waters beyond. This intermittent approach has fostered a maritime community that, over time, has become increasin...(展开全部)