“denis twitchett”

This book describes how the Chinese government, between about 620 and 850, developed an official organization designed to select, process, and edit material for inclusion in official historical works eventually to be incorporated in an official history of the dynasty. The first part gives a detailed... More

To win the approval of China's native elites, Qing China's new Manchu leaders developed an ambitious plan to return Confucianism to civil society by observing laborious and time-consuming mourning rituals, the touchstones of a well-ordered Confucian society. The first to do so in any language, Norma... More

Scholars have long recognised that Chinese politics changed fundamentally in 1925, when the radical nationalism of the May Thirtieth Movement took political centre stage. This book explains the connection between the beginning of the Nationalist revolution and the introduction of modern World War I ... More

The Opium Wars ushered in an era of intensive Western imperialism in China, at a time when the Ch???ing dynasty was already in decline, forcing a small number of Chinese officials to come to the realisation that China must protect itself by adopting the same military technology that had brought it n... More

This book argues that the Mongol invasion of China in the thirteenth century precipitated a lasting transformation of marriage and property laws that deprived women of their property rights and reduced their legal and economic autonomy. It describes how indigenous social change combined with foreign... More

Every general account of the development of Chinese thought makes mention of Tung Chung-shu (ca. 195 - 105 B.C.E.) as one of the pivotal philosophers of the Han (206 B.C.E. - 220 C.E.). Tung's interpretations helped establish the first state-sponsored Confucian Canon, and created an ideal of the rul... More

The remains of Tai Fu's lost collection Kuang-i chi ("The Great Book of Marvels") preserve three hundred short tales of encounters with the other world. Through the eyes of an official, the picture emerges of a complex lay society, served by a mixed priesthood of ritual practitioners. This study dev... More

Thomas Buoye examines the impact of large-scale economic change on social conflict in eighteenth-century China. He draws on a large number of documented cases of violent property disputes to recreate the social tensions fostered by the development of property rights, an unprecedented growing populat... More

Tu Fu is, by universal consent, the greatest poet of the Chinese tradition. In the epochal An Lushan rebellion, he alone of his contemporaries consistently recorded in poetry the great events and pervasive sufferings of the time. For a millennium now, Tu Fu's poetry has been accepted as epitomizing ... More

This is the first comprehensive study in a Western language of Liu Tsung-yUan, one of the finest prose stylists China has ever produced. Liu was not only a leading writer of T'ang China (618-906) but also an important thinker of his time. Examining every major aspect of his life and thought, the boo... More