The book is the volume of "Selected Biographies of Treacherous Officials in Ancient China" among a series of books for "100 Biographies on Chinese Historical Figures".

The book is the volume of "Selected Biographies of Famous Ministers and Officials in China" among a series of books for "100 Biographies on Chinese Historical Figures".

The book is the volume of "Selected Biographies of Corrupt Officials in Ancient China" among a series of books for "100 Biographies on Chinese Historical Figures".

Covering the time span from the Shang to the Qing Periods (1520BC - 1911AD), Gang Deng examines important factors in the decline of the Chinese economy from medieval sophistication to modern underdevelopment. These factors include: * resource endowments * socio-economic structure * property rights * state and bureaucracy * ideology and values * geo-political environment * internal rebellions * external invasions and conquests The Premodern Chinese Economy is a comprehensive analysis of China's economic history and provides essential background to the study of this country's modern struggle for growth and development. Deng's emphasis on comparative analysis offers new insights into the concept of underdevelopment and theories of transitional economics. This will become a major reference work in the fields of Chinese studies, economic history and development studies.

"The last empress of China--Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi (1835-1908)--is remembered as one of history's monsters, an iron-willed concubine who, after usurping power in 1861, ruled from the Dragon Throne for half a century. Her reign, in the aftermath of the Opium Wars and through the Boxer Rebellion until the collapse of the 2,000-year-old empire, has traditionally been seen as one of murder, poison, and intrigue. But the wicked image is false." "In 1974, to the dismay of scholars, Sir Edmund Backhouse--the biographer most responsible for the widespread vision of Tzu Hsi as monster--was revealed to be a con man. And now the author of the celebrated best-seller The Soong Dynasty has undertaken the first complete reappraisal of the empress--exposing Backhouse's writings about her as a major hoax and forgery, and establishing that the most important Western correspondent in Peking during her reign--Dr. George Morrison of the London Times--kept a secret diary contradicting his own dispatches about Tzu Hsi." "Drawing on many unpublished or long-overlooked contemporary sources, Sterling Seagrave shows us Tzu Hsi as a complex woman whose desperate--though often misguided--efforts to hold her country together take on a different coloration in the context of unrelenting foreign attempts to colonize and tear it apart. Far from being all-powerful, she was actually a hostage of vengeful Manchu princes who were using her in a power struggle against both Chinese reformers and foreign interference." "Here at last is an authentic portrait of this fascinating historical figure, as well as insight into the Western craving to believe in a sinister, dragon-haunted Orient. Dragon Lady is at once a compelling biography and the equally compelling story of how a myth was contrived, how it endured, and how, ultimately, the truth has emerged."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This book systematically outlines the development of ancient Chinese. Consisting of 20 chapters, the self-contained work presents macro-level discussions on a broad range of topics, including: philology, phonology, exegetics, certain words’ special meanings, sentence types, the flexible use of words, different grammars in ancient and modern times, and rhetoric. Though chiefly focusing on vocabulary, the book also addresses grammar, and points out grammar problems that differ considerably from those in modern Chinese, in addition to combining morphology and syntax. Further, unlike the majority of textbooks on the subject, it pays more attention to the rhetoric used in ancient Chinese literary works. Rather than simply analyzing linguistic phenomena, the book also (and more importantly) provides a meaningful approach to the study of ancient Chinese. Accordingly, it offers a valuable asset for researchers, graduate students, and everyone else who is interested in ancient Chinese.

After the strikingly beautiful Peony Pavilion, how could one write about love and the ideal of emotional authenticity (qing) in the chuanqi genre? This book presents a group of creative dramatists who confronted this challenge by giving the romantic theme of chuanqi their unique comic twists. This book demonstrates how their comic articulations bring the qing ideal down to the mundane world of family obligations, political ambitions, commercial interests, and gender frustrations. By highlighting the crucial but understudied role that the comic plays, this book enriches our understanding of the intellectual depth and critical scope of the chuanqi genre.

Developed from a research conference organized by the Committee on Chinese Thought of the Association for Asian Studies.