A murder mystery with fantasy elements set in the land of Nizon, where people eat with scissors rather than with chopsticks. Fantasy in a modern environment complete with computers and cellphones. Business manager Ken Udamana, a husband and a father of two, believes that someone is planning to murder him and takes a shot at find out who. This novel contains some violence and touches on the subject of an adulterous relationship.

This book offers a complete translation of four early plays of the Yang Family Generals. The story of the Yang Family Generals, particularly its female generals, was a perennial favorite on the Chinese stage in the 19th and 20th centuries. In detailing the role of this military family in the Song-Khitan wars of the late 10th and early 11th centuries, these four plays are all in the form of zaju, a type of play that originated in the 13th century. These plays are from the 15th and 16th centuries and allow a glimpse into earlier renditions of the Yang Family saga, which is a decidedly more male-centered tradition than that performed in the Qing dynasty. This volume offers the only complete English-language translation of these early plays. These plays allow access to the earliest phase in the development of the Yang Family saga. The plays provide information on the staging of large battle scenes on the stage and have considerable literary and cultural value.

From mucking out stables, grooming, feeding, and even visits to the dentist a lot goes into taking care of a horse. Engaging text, entertaining quizzes, and colorful photos help girls learn how to keep their favorite equine as healthy as a horse!

This book collects and studies the colourful sports and history of countries along the historical Silk Road from Chang'an to Athens, including a wide range of sports ranging from polo and chess to archery and lion dance. It will examine, research and analyse a large number of sports cultural relics and documentary materials unearthed by archaeology in recent years, and comprehensively collects and classifies these sports materials which belong to different countries along the Silk Road. In doing so, it aims to promote the sports forms of these countries and set the context of sports development, so as to raise awareness about the exchange and dissemination of sports culture between ancient China and Western countries.

The book is the volume of “The History of Customs in Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasty” among a series of books of “Deep into China Histories”. The earliest known written records of the history of China date from as early as 1250 BC, from the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 BC) and the Bamboo Annals (296 BC) describe a Xia dynasty (c. 2070–1600 BC) before the Shang, but no writing is known from the period The Shang ruled in the Yellow River valley, which is commonly held to be the cradle of Chinese civilization. However, Neolithic civilizations originated at various cultural centers along both the Yellow River and Yangtze River. These Yellow River and Yangtze civilizations arose millennia before the Shang. With thousands of years of continuous history, China is one of the world's oldest civilizations, and is regarded as one of the cradles of civilization.The Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BC) supplanted the Shang and introduced the concept of the Mandate of Heaven to justify their rule. The central Zhou government began to weaken due to external and internal pressures in the 8th century BC, and the country eventually splintered into smaller states during the Spring and Autumn period. These states became independent and warred with one another in the following Warring States period. Much of traditional Chinese culture, literature and philosophy first developed during those troubled times.In 221 BC Qin Shi Huang conquered the various warring states and created for himself the title of Huangdi or "emperor" of the Qin, marking the beginning of imperial China. However, the oppressive government fell soon after his death, and was supplanted by the longer-lived Han dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD). Successive dynasties developed bureaucratic systems that enabled the emperor to control vast territories directly. In the 21 centuries from 206 BC until AD 1912, routine administrative tasks were handled by a special elite of scholar-officials. Young men, well-versed in calligraphy, history, literature, and philosophy, were carefully selected through difficult government examinations. China's last dynasty was the Qing (1644–1912), which was replaced by the Republic of China in 1912, and in the mainland by the People's Republic of China in 1949.Chinese history has alternated between periods of political unity and peace, and periods of war and failed statehood – the most recent being the Chinese Civil War (1927–1949). China was occasionally dominated by steppe peoples, most of whom were eventually assimilated into the Han Chinese culture and population. Between eras of multiple kingdoms and warlordism, Chinese dynasties have ruled parts or all of China; in some eras control stretched as far as Xinjiang and Tibet, as at present. Traditional culture, and influences from other parts of Asia and the Western world (carried by waves of immigration, cultural assimilation, expansion, and foreign contact), form the basis of the modern culture of China.

An attempt to cover all aspects of children's make-believe. The authors examine how imaginative play begins and develops and provide examples and evidence on the young child's invocation of imaginary friends, the adolescent's daring games and the adult's private imagery and inner thought.

Wonder, mysticism, heartache, and joy are the stones that set the path to one girl's journey as her destiny unfolds. In the village of Huanan, in medieval China, the deity that rules is the Great Huli Jing. Though twelve-year-old Li Jing's name is a different character entirely from the Huli Jing, the sound is close enough to provide constant teasing-but maybe is also a source of greater destiny and power. Jing's life isn't easy. Her father is a poor tea farmer, and her family has come to the conclusion that in order for everyone to survive, Jing must be sacrificed for the common good. She is sold as a bride to the Koh family, where she will be the wife and nursemaid to their three-year-old son, Ju'nan. It's not fair, and Jing feels this bitterly, especially when she is treated poorly by the Koh's, and sold yet again into a worse situation that leads Jing to believe her only option is to run away, and find home again. With the help of a spider who weaves Jing a means to escape, and a nightingale who helps her find her way, Jing embarks on a quest back to Huanan--and to herself.

The dramatic genre of the horse dance (jaranan) is part of an age-old Javanese tradition displaying wide local and regional variations. A striking feature of the performances of the majority of horse dance groups is the appearance of trance dancers. These are used as a means of establishing contact with the spirits of the ancestors, who continue to play an important part in the lives of their descendants as moral beacons in the solution of problems and the fulfillment of wishes. As a consequence of the modernization of society in almost every aspect of life, vigorously propagated as it was by the Suharto regime in the period 1966-1998, the trance in horse dancing has been strongly discouraged as an anachronism. This has prompted a search for new ways of preserving this dramatic genre for future generations. The way the administration of Kediri and a number of local horse dance companies set about solving this problem constitutes a dominant theme of this book. To bring the phenomenon of the horse dance in Java into sharper focus, a brief account is given of its history, as well as a description of the great variety of horse dance groups of and a range of aspects of this genre.

In 1585, Luis Frois, a 53 year old Jesuit who spent all of his adult life in Japan listed 611(!) ways Europeans and Japanese were contrary (completely opposite) to one another. Robin D. Gill, a 53 year old writer who spent most of his adulthood in Japan, translates these topsy-turvy claims - we sniff the top of our melons to see if they are ripe / they sniff the bottom of theirs (10% of the book), examines their validity (20% of the book), and plays with them (70% of the book). Readers with the intellectual horsepower to enjoy ideas will be grateful for pages discussing things like the significance of black and white clothing or large eyes vs. small ones, while others with a ken to collect quirky facts will be delighted to find, say, that the women in Kyoto were known to urinate standing up, or Japanese horses had their stale gathered by long-handled ladles, etc., and serious students of history and comparative culture will gain a better understanding of the nature of radical difference (exotic, by definition) and its relationship with the farsighted policy of accommodation pioneered by Valignano in the Far East.

[Imperial Power: Destiny; Cold Use]The reason was because he had used the name of marriage to seize the life and death power of his wife and then ruthlessly abandoned her, who was already of no value to him. But how could he have known that the woman whose personality had changed greatly would provoke his authority and even provoke everything related to him ...[Love, Gentle, Mystical, Past]That childhood sweetheart of hers, that scholarly man who had sworn an oath to her ... When they saw each other again, they found that they were already high above in the temple. Was that simple white-robed man no longer as simple as she remembered him?[Sword Kill: Darkness: Four Stones: Lovesick]The Heaven's Edge was only for the sake of his lover. The mysterious man in black, in the name of an assassin — was his protector for her or the rumored Four Stones that could shake the world?[Hiding, Disguise, Cute]The pretty maidservant who was following closely behind them was actually the dignified Emperor of Chu, disguised as a woman. When the truth was revealed, he was actually from the same world as her ...