A rare historical document that makes compelling reading, China Journal is a moving record of missionary and Chinese life nearly a century ago, "a t ale of ordinary mortals traveling steadily toward their doom".--Publishers Weekly. 8-page photograph insert.

A study of U.S.-Chinese relations involving the U.S. Army, this work focuses at the personnel level on the Army's service in China. While studies have been published of the U.S. Marines' and U.S. Navy's involvement in China, little attention has been given the Army's missions in this theater. Operations in China were a key part of the history and traditions of the 9th, 14th, 15th and 31st Regiments, whose coats of arms still feature dragons as symbols of their service there. Many who served in the 15th in China went on to impressive careers as general officers, prompting one soldier to ask "what other infantry regiment of those days can boast of such an alumni list?" Also covered is the 31st Regiments' involvement in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War, the prelude of the coming of World War II in Asia.

As China struggled to redefine itself at the turn of the twentieth century, nationalism, religion, and material culture intertwined in revealing ways. This phenomenon is evident in the twin biographies of North China’s leading Catholic bishop of the time, Alphonse Favier (1837–1905), and the Beitang cathedral, epicenter of the Roman Catholic mission in China through incarnations that began in 1701. After its relocation and reconstruction under Favier’s supervision, the cathedral—and Favier—miraculously survived a two-month siege in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion. Featuring a French Gothic Revival design augmented by Chinese dragon–shaped gargoyles, marble balustrades in the style of Daoist and Buddhist temples, and other Chinese aesthetic flourishes, Beitang remains an icon of Sino-Western interaction. Anthony Clark draws on archival materials from the Vatican and collections in France, Italy, China, Poland, and the United States to trace the prominent role of French architecture in introducing Western culture and Catholicism to China. A principal device was the aesthetic imagined by the Gothic Revival movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the premier example of this in China being the Beitang cathedral. Bishop Favier’s biography is a lens through which to examine Western missionaries’ role in colonial endeavors and their complex relationship with the Chinese communities in which they lived and worked.

The first book-length study of China's Catholic martyr saints, this work recounts the cultural, religious, and economic conflicts that unfolded during China's Qing dynasty (1644–1911). China's Saints considers closely the personal and public lives of both missionaries and Chinese converts lived during China's late-imperial era.

This is the first book to provide a panoramic view of the origins of the Boxer War. Comprehensively examining this historical conundrum of the 20th century from a detached perspective, the book is based on ten years of exhaustive research of both unpublished and published materials from all nine countries involved. Analysing the misunderstanding between the Chinese and foreign governments of the day, Lanxin Xiang debunks the traditional view that the anti-foreign Empress Dowager of the Chinese Empire was chiefly responsible for this catastrophic episode which altered the course of 20th century China's relationship with the west.

The eighteen missionaries who traveled to Shansi were dedicated, pious, hard-working clerics. Ernest Atwater; the young minister Francis Ward Davis and his wife Lydia; Charles Wesley Price and his family; and Susan Rowena Bird; to name a few, were all spurred by their strong beliefs, but they were also quite ignorant of other countries and cultures. Often having to live in disease-ravaged area of China and under harsh conditions, they were repulsed by the native lifestyle and saw further need to change it. Brandt presents finely wrought portraits of these people, detailing the lives of both the missionaries and thier converts, their experiences in the interior province of Shansi, and their struggle in trying to spread Christianity among people whose language they did not speak and whose traditions and customs they did not nderstand. Brandt's gripping narrative brings to light a penetrating and sincere study of the "Oberlin Band" of Protestant missionaries and captures the essence of their daily life. Considered in a fair and honest context, the descriptions are often taken directly from personal correspondence and journals. This tragic story of the clash between two cultures is primarily the story of the missionaries...six men, seven women, and five children. Their names appear on bronze tablets on the only monument in America ever erected to individuals who died in that uprising, the Memorial Arch on the campus of Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio.

A vivid study of China’s modernization through the lens of one schoolteacher’s life: “A tour de force of originality, clarity, and skillful organization.” —Chinese Historical Review In this beautifully crafted study of one emblematic life, Henrietta Harrison addresses large themes in Chinese history while conveying with great immediacy the textures and rhythms of everyday existence in the countryside in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Liu Dapeng was a provincial degree-holder who never held government office. Through the story of his family, the author illustrates the decline of the countryside in relation to the cities as a result of modernization, and the transformation of Confucian ideology as a result of these changes. Based on nearly four hundred volumes of Liu’s diary and other writings, the book illustrates what it was like to study in an academy and to be a schoolteacher, the pressures of changing family relationships, the daily grind of work in industry and agriculture, people’s experience with government, and life under the Japanese occupation. “Should be on any short-list of ‘necessary’ books on modern China.” —American Historical Review “Harrison does nothing less than open up for us a whole new world.” —Journal of Asian Studies

Content Description #Includes bibliographical references and index.

This global environmental and political history “will redefine the way we think about the European colonial project” (Observer). “ . . . sets the triumph of the late 19th-century Western imperialism in the context of catastrophic El Niño weather patterns at that time . . . groundbreaking, mind-stretching.” —The Independent Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites. Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants’ lives.