Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing by Li Huaiyin, and: Imaginations of Late Ming Dynasty in Late Imperial China by Qin Yanchun

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-64
Author(s):  
Guo Chao
Keyword(s):  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Late Ming ◽  
Imperial China ◽  
Late Ming Dynasty

‘CANNOT BE FED ON WHEN STARVING’: AN ANALYSIS OF THE ECONOMIC THOUGHT SURROUNDING CHINA’S EARLIER USE OF PAPER MONEY

2013 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-395
Author(s):  
NIV HORESH
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Private Institutions ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Paper Money ◽  
Imperial China ◽  
The Stability

This article argues that Western impressions of the Chinese pre-modern monetary experience might have been excessively colored by Marco Polo’s favorable commentary on the stability of the Mongol polity and its dissemination of paper money. Experiments with unconvertible paper money had ultimately been no more successful in late-imperial China than they were in the early-modern West. By 1430, in fact, the Ming dynasty was forced to abandon the issuance of paper money altogether. The genesis of paper money both in China and it the West had originally emanated from private institutions. However, royally chartered banks of issue were conspicuously absent from the Chinese setting until the late nineteenth century.

scholarly journals Writing for Justice: An Activist Beginning of the Cult of Female Chastity in Late Imperial China

2012 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 991-1012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siyen Fei
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Late Ming ◽  
Imperial China

This article examines the rise of the chastity cult—the quintessential symbol of patriarchal suppression of female agency for modern reformers—during the sixteenth century. Despite the resultant stricter control over female sexuality, the growing dominance of the chastity cult cannot be simply construed as a product of top-down imposition. What made possible the penetrative power of chastity practice, this article argues, was a state indoctrination working in reverse. That is, the fast ascendance of the chastity cult in the late Ming was powered by various strains of activism that sought to protest and repair the failing system of chastity awards. The activist impetus greatly enhanced the centrality and influence of chastity practice in social life and, in doing so, opened the notion of chastity to contentious and sometimes subversive negotiations.

The Use of Pain in Childbirth Recorded in Chinese Medical Works

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-124
Author(s):  
Margaret Wee Siang Ng
Keyword(s):  
Pregnant Woman ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Medical Work ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Birth Complications ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Birth Attendants ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Imperial China ◽  
Pregnant Mothers

In pre-modern China, midwives and pregnant mothers used pain description as a tool to gauge the progress of childbirth. This was recorded in the twelfth century medical work Shichan lun 十產論 (Ten Topics on Birth), which takes the form of a list, describing routine childbirth, birth complications and the techniques used to manage those specific complications. It was the most widely quoted and disseminated work on childbirth and birth complications in late imperial China. The description of childbirth pain in Shichan lun would shift in meaning and use by the end of the imperial period, leading to the representation of childbirth pain as inevitable, nondescript and immutable. This study examines how pain was a tool for the pregnant woman and birth attendants in Shichan lun. This reading of pain challenges our current understanding of the value and meaning of pain in childbirth physiology.

Wang Fu-chih's Views on History and Historical Writing

1968 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Y. Teng
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Blaise Pascal ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
The Social ◽  
René Descartes ◽  
Imperial China

In the seventeenth century, at the end of the Ming and the beginning of the Ch'ing dynasties, China produced three outstanding scholars: Huang Tsung-hsi (1619–95), Ku Yen-wu (1613–82), and Wang Fu-chih (1619–92), all great thinkers, voluminous writers, and ardent patriots. The social and political chaos, economic deterioration, excess of Wang Yang-ming's intuitionism, and, above all, the conquest of China by the Manchus must have stimulated the best minds to develop their ideas in a more practical direction. They were contemporaries of René Descartes 1596–1650) and Blaise Pascal (1623–62) and only slightly earlier than Isaac Newton (1642–1727). Confined by their cultural tradition and living in a vast but largely isolated empire, these men naturally developed ideas different from those of their European contemporaries. But they had enough challenges of their own to meet. The originality in their ideas bespeaks the intellectual vigor of late imperial China.

Gender, Technical Innovation, and Gu Family Embroidery in Late-Ming Shangha

2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-130
Author(s):  
I-Fen Huang
Keyword(s):  
Technical Innovation ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Late Ming ◽  
Shanghai Museum ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Technical Innovations ◽  
Imperial China

This paper takes Gu Family embroidery as a case study to discuss the contribution of technical innovation to the construction of gender in late imperial China so as to better understand Guxiu in its technical, social, and artistic contexts. Focusing on the Flowers and Fishes album (dated 1641, Shanghai Museum) by Han Ximeng, I argue that Gu family ladies, such as Han Ximeng, used embroidery as a means to display their individual creativity; and, further, by means of technical innovations, contributed not only to their family finances but also to the art and culture of late Ming Shanghai. While some of the technical innovations that the Gu family ladies achieved were driven by the desire to meet the literati aesthetic of their time, eventually, in the case of Han Ximeng, she went beyond the literati taste for ‘painting-like’ embroidery to assert the special qualities of embroidery. By affirming her own authorship, drawing attention to the feminine medium in which she worked and claiming the significance of her work with a carefully chosen subject, Han subverted the conventions of male painting in subtle ways and demonstrated her subjectivity.

The Emaciated Soul: Four Women’s Self-Inscriptions on Their Portraits in Late Imperial China

NAN Nü ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-69
Author(s):  
Yuanfei Wang
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Late Ming ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Imperial China

Abstract This article examines the emaciated self-images of four women’s self-inscription poems on their own portraits. They are Huang Hong (early seventeenth century), Xi Peilan (1760­­­–after 1829), Tan Yinmei (fl. mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth century) and Zheng Lansun (1819-61). These women similarly describe their self-images as qiaocui (emaciated), alluding to the legendary girl poet Feng Xiaoqing. Inherently ambivalent, qiaocui could imply sexual and erotic appeal, the virtuous mind of a recluse, sickness, ordinariness, melancholy, as well as aging and death. The article argues for the importance of the rhetoric of qiaocui and the topoi of Feng Xiaoqing in the self-inscriptions by women in Hangzhou and the broader Jiangnan region as a medium to construct their female subjectivity. This article suggests that, initially a persona publicly circulated in the late Ming, the topoi of Feng Xiaoqing came to define the women’s personhood in private spaces in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Popular Culture in Late Imperial China

1985 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith A. Berling ◽  
James Hayes ◽  
Robert E. Hegel ◽  
Leo Ou-fan Lee ◽  
Victor H. Mair ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial China
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