Genghis Khan built a formidable land empire, but he never crossed the sea. Yet by the time his grandson Kublai Khan had defeated the last vestiges of the Song empire and established the Yuan dynasty in 1279, the Mongols controlled the most powerful navy in the world. How did a nomad come to conquer China and master the sea? Based on ten years of research and a lifetime of immer...(展开全部)

Edwin George Pulleyblank (Ted) was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, in 1922, the son of W. G. E. Pulleyblank, a much respected high school teacher. He developed a strong interest in languages while still in high school and specialized in Greek and Latin Classics at the University of Alberta, where he graduated in 1942. During the Second World War he was engaged in intelligence...(展开全部)

For 2000 years the state-run libraries of imperial China systematically assembled standard collections of books from the past and present. Although the collections themselves were lost through warfare and fire, the classified catalogues prepared by the Privy Director of Books were often used in compiling national bibliographies for the state-sponsored dynastic histories. Throug...(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)

The earliest Buddhist art of China can only be understood when seen in relation to a wider area comprising Central Asia and India. This is exactly the purpose of the underlying volume. Presenting the earliest Buddhist art of China in its wider context of the Bactrian and Southern Silk Road regions in Central Asia (1st to 4th century A.D.), the author offers clarifications of th...(展开全部)

By the mid-fourteenth century, the world empire founded by Genghis Khan was in crisis. The Mongol Ilkhanate had ended in Iran and Iraq, China’s Mongol rulers were threatened by the native Ming, and the Golden Horde and the Central Asian Mongols were prey to internal discord. Into this void moved the warlord Tamerlane, the last major conqueror to emerge from Inner Asia. In this...(展开全部)

Poet-Monks focuses on the literary and religious practices of Buddhist poet-monks in Tang-dynasty China to propose an alternative historical arc of medieval Chinese poetry. Combining large-scale quantitative analysis with close readings of important literary texts, Thomas J. Mazanec describes how Buddhist poet-monks, who first appeared in the latter half of Tang-dynasty China, ...(展开全部)

Bertil and Hseng Noung Lintner, and their baby daughter, born enroute, spent one and a half years traveling through northern and eastern Burma, from 1985-87. Throughout their account, they describe, with rare and deep insight, the struggle by northern Burma’s ethnic groups against brutal Burmese army rule, and record the decline and fall of the Communist Party of Burma. During ...(展开全部)