Böcker i Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series-serien

A reference work from one of the world's preeminent linguists, A Comprehensive Manchu-English Dictionary substantially enlarges and revises Jerry Norman's 1978 Concise Manchu-English Lexicon. With hundreds of new entries and a new introduction on pronunciation and script, it will become the standard English-language resource on the Manchu language.

During the Song dynasty (960-1278), some of China's elite found an elegant and subtle means of dissent: landscape painting. By examining literary archetypes, painting titles, contemporary inscriptions, and the historical context, Murck shows that certain paintings expressed strong political opinions-some transparent, others deliberately concealed.

The essays in Literary History in and beyond China examine the anthological histories that shape the concept of a particular genre, the interpretive positions that impel our aesthetic judgments, the conceptual categories that determine how literary history is framed, and the history of literary historiography itself.

The Threshold, a study of the culture of historiography in early medieval China, explores the History of Liu-Song, a dynastic history of the fifth century compiled in 488. Zeb Raft shows how history was constructed through rhetorical elements including the narration of officialdom, the anecdote, and, above all, the historical document.

In Saying All That Can Be Said, Keith McMahon presents the first full analysis of the sexually explicit portrayals in the Ming novel Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase). McMahon places the novel in the historical context of premodern Chinese sexual culture and echoes its way of taking sex as a vehicle for reading the world.

In Lineages Embedded in Temple Networks, Richard Wang explores the key role played by elite Daoists in social and cultural life in Ming China, notably by mediating between local networks and the state through their clerical lineages-empire-wide networks channeling knowledge and resources-and by controlling central temples.

Celestial Masters is the first book in any Western language devoted solely to the founding of Daoism. It traces the movement from the mid-second century CE through the sixth century, and provides a detailed analysis of ritual life within the movement, covering the roles of common believer or Daoist citizen, novice, and priest or libationer.

This dual-language compilation of seven complete major works and many shorter pieces from the Confucian period through the Ch'ing dynasty will be indispensable to students of Chinese literature as well as theorists and scholars of other languages.

Liu Zhi (ca. 1670-1724) was one of the most important scholars of Islam in traditional China. His Tianfang xingli (Nature and Principle in Islam) focuses on the roots or principles of Islam. The annotations here explain Liu's text and draw attention to parallels in Chinese-, Arabic-, and Persian-language works as well as differences.

The first intellectual history of Song, Yuan, and Ming China written from a local perspective, Localizing Learning traces how debates over the relative value of cultural accomplishment and political service unfolded locally. Close readings and quantitative analysis of social networks consider why and how the local literati enterprise was built.

The sixth edition of Chinese History: A New Manual, revised and expanded to two volumes, includes the latest developments in digital tools and the ancillary disciplines essential for work on Chinese history. Volume 1 covers topics ranging from Language to Technology. Volume 2 presents primary and secondary sources chronologically by period.

The sixth edition of Chinese History: A New Manual, revised and expanded to two volumes, includes the latest developments in digital tools and the ancillary disciplines essential for work on Chinese history. Volume 1 covers topics ranging from Language to Technology. Volume 2 presents primary and secondary sources chronologically by period.

Making the Gods Speak presents a comprehensive accounting for the processes of divine revelations. Focusing the bulk of his analysis on spirit-writing, Vincent Goossaert offers a ritual-centered framework to study revelation in Chinese cultural history and comparatively with the revelatory practices of other religious traditions.

The first book of its kind in any Western language, Wang Anshi and Song Poetic Culture brings into focus a cluster of issues that are central to the understanding of both the poet and his cultural milieu. Together, the chapters form a varied mosaic of Wang Anshi's work and its critical reception in the larger context of Song poetic culture.

Building for Oil is a historical account of the oil town of Daqing in northeastern China during the formative years of the People's Republic and describes Daqing's rise and fall as a national model city. Hou Li traces the roots of the Chinese socialist state and its early industrialization and modernization policies.

Lucas Bender considers Du Fu's pivotal role in the transformation of Chinese poetic understanding over the last millennium. Du Fu anticipated important philosophical transitions from the late-medieval into the early-modern period and laid the template for a new and perduring paradigm of poetry's relationship to ethics.

The Mongol conquest of north China inflicted terrible destruction, wiping out more than one-third of the population and dismantling the existing social order. Jinping Wang recounts the riveting story of how northern Chinese people adapted to these trying circumstances and interacted with their conquerors to create a drastically new social order.

Bossler traces changing gender relations in China from the tenth to fourteenth centuries by examining three critical categories of women: courtesans, concubines, and faithful wives. Bossler illustrates how these groups intersected and interacted with men, influencing the social, political, and intellectual life of the Song and Yuan dynasties.

Alexander Des Forges reads shiwen from a literary perspective, showing how the examination essay redefined prose aesthetics, transformed the work of writing, and marked the aesthetic as a key arena for contestation of authority as candidates, examiners, and critics joined to form a dominant social class of literary producers.

Structures of the Earth is the first study of the emergent genre of geographical writing and the metageographies that structured its spatial thought during the "Age of Disunion" and continue to illuminate spatial complexities that have been incompatible with the imperial and nationalist ideal of a monolithic China at the center of the world.

In his reading of the Shishuo xinyu, the most important anecdotal collection of medieval China, Jack W. Chen presents an extended meditation on the anecdote form, both what it affords in terms of representing a social community and how it provides a space for the rehearsal of certain longstanding philosophical and cultural arguments.

The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE-800 CE investigates what dreams meant in late classical and early medieval China. Mapping a common dreamscape that underlies manuals of dream interpretation, scriptural instructions, and other texts, Robert Ford Campany sheds light on how people in a distant age wrestled with-and celebrated-the strangeness of dreams.

China's sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an unprecedented explosion in the production of woodblock-printed books. This volume considers what a wide range of late Ming books reveal about their readers' ideas of a pleasurable private life, as well as their orientations toward early modernity and toward traditional Chinese sources of authority.

Tamara T. Chin explores the politics of representation during the Han dynasty at a pivotal moment when China was asserting imperialist power on the Eurasian continent and expanding its local and long-distance ("Silk Road") markets. Chin explains why rival political groups introduced new literary forms with which to represent these expanded markets.

Using the new tools of GIS and social network analysis, Nicolas Tackett shows that the great Tang aristocratic families were more successful than previously believed in adapting to social and economic changes in the seventh and eighth centuries. Tang political influence waned only after many of them were killed during the three decades after 880.

Feeling the Past in Seventeenth-Century China highlights the central role played by the body in writers' memories during the Ming-Qing cataclysm. Sight, sound, taste, and touch configured ordinary experiences next to traumatic events. This embodied experience reveals literature's mission of remembrance as a moral endeavor in cultural continuity.

Through research into Daoist ritual in history and as it survives today, Andersen shows that the concept of truth in Chinese Daoist philosophy and ritual posits being as a paradox anchored in the inexistent Way, and consists in seeking to be an exception to ordinary norms and rules of behavior which nonetheless engages what is common to us all.

This book examines the evolution of Daoist beliefs about human liability and redemption over eight centuries and outlines ritual procedures for rescuing an ill-starred destiny, focusing on the Daoist vocabulary of bondage and redemption, the changing meanings of sacrifice, and metaphoric conceptualizations bridging the visible and invisible realms.

Ethnic Chrysalis is the first book in English to cover the early modern history of the Orochen, an ethnic group that has for centuries inhabited areas now belonging to the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China. Kim examines how the impact of political organization in one era can endure in a group's social and cultural values.