The Tu family has minor conflict with Moslem peasants over riparian rights during Moslem-Chinese wars.

Aiping Mu was born to parents prominent in the Communist hierarchy - her father was Political Commissar for the Beijing region and her mother ran one of the city's universities - and in her early years lived the pampered life of the Party elite: luxury housing, guards, servants and private schooling. Both parents were considered intellectuals within the Party and from the start experienced the factional infighting and periodic purges which culminated decades later in the Cultural Revolution and the break-up of the family. Aiping herself was one of the first Red Guards before being denounced as a bourgeois intellectual and exiled to a remote province. In the guise of following one family's rising and falling fortunes PARTY LIVES tells the story of modern China itself, written from the perspective of one who grew up close to the seat of power in history (whether as revolutionaries or Red Guard). With rare insights into the life of the political elite and the mechanics of power and patronage in Beijing, the focus is also upon more domestic issues such as the family and the role of women in this unique and powerfully moving book.

This book unfolds an amazing story of discovery--whether you are a descendent of the Too clan or otherwise--you, the reader, will experience for yourself a fascinating revelation of a man's quest to trace his family tree. Henry Too, the man who has undertaken this genealogical pursuit, is the husband of my mother's younger sister. That makes him my yi jeung 姨丈, a rather endearing name by which I've called him all my life. This is a book that is partly genealogy, partly history, and very much family. There will be stories that some of you may recall--stories of happy times, narratives of despairing moments, and tales that tug at your heart strings--while for others who will be hearing or reading these accounts for the first time, it is hoped that these chapters will add to the rich tapestry of memories that you will continue to weave of your family, the Too clan. Devour it cover to cover, or savour it piecemeal--read this book like you would greet an old friend, for hidden in the pages between the anecdotes and precious photos are familial ties waiting to be renewed or found. Truly, this is a book to be kept as a family heirloom--a window to the past for the descendants of the future. Joanne Chow 周尤敏

The Shih-shuo hsin-yu, conventionally translated as A New Account of Tales of the World, is one of the most significant works in the entire Chinese literary tradition. It established a genre (the Shih-shuo t'i) and inspired dozens of imitations from the later part of the Tang dynasty (618-907) to the early Republican era of the 20th century. The Shih-shuo hsin-yu consists of more than a thousand historical anecdotes about elite life in the late Han dynasty and the Wei-Chin period (about AD 150-420).

The Zen Buddhist monastery Daitokuji in Kyoto has long been revered as a cloistered meditation centre, a repository of art treasures, and a wellspring of the "Zen aesthetic." Gregory Levine's Daitokuji unsettles these conventional notions with groundbreaking inquiry into the significant and surprising visual and social identities of sculpture, painting, and calligraphy associated with this fourteenth-century monastery and its enduring monastic and lay communities. The book begins with a study of Zen portraiture at Daitokuji that reveals the precariousness of portrait likeness; the face that gazes out from an abbot's painting or statue may not be who we expect it to be or submit quietly to interpretation. By tracing the life of Daitokuji's famed statue of the chanoyu patriarch Sen no Riky-u (1522-91), which was all but destroyed by the ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-98) but survived in Rash-omon-like narratives and reconstituted sculptural forms, Levine throws light upon the contested status of images and their mytho-poetic potential. Levine then draws from the seventeenth-century journal of K-ogetsu S-ogan, Bokuseki no utsushi, to explore practices of calligraphy connoisseurship at Daitokuji and the pivotal role played by the monastery's abbots within Kyoto art circles. The book's final section explores Daitokuji's annual airings of temple treasures not merely as a practice geared toward preservation but also as a space in which different communities vie for authority over the artistic past. An epilogue follows the peripatetic journey of the monastery's scrolls of the 500 Luohan from China to Japan, to exhibition and partial sale in the West, and back to Daitokuji. Illuminating canonical and heretofore ignored works and mining a trove of documents, diaries, and modern writings, Levine argues for the plurality of Daitokuji's visual arts and the breadth of social and ritual circumstances of art making and viewing within the monastery. This diversity encourages reconsideration of stereotyped notions of "Zen art" and offers specialists and general readers alike opportunity to explore the fertile and sometimes volatile nexus of the visual arts and religious sites in Japan.