"An extraordinary feat: the best institutional study based on archives ever to have been done in the China field. It will set the standard for a generation of researchers."--Philip A. Kuhn, Harvard University

This is an English translation of one of Korea's most celebrated historical works, a premodern classic so well known to Koreans that it has inspired contemporary literature and television. This translation opens a new window on early 19th-century Korea.

Feng Youlan (1895-1990) was twentieth-century China's leading original philosopher as well as its foremost historian of Chinese philosophy. He is best known in the West for his two-volume History of Chinese Philosophy, which remains the standard general history of the subject. He is also known for a series of books in which he developed a philosophical system combining elements of Chinese philosophy, particularly Neo-Confucianism, with Western thinking. In his preface to The Hall of Three Pines, Feng likens his autobiography to accounts written by "authors of ancient times, [who] on completing their major works, often wrote a separate piece to recount their origins and experiences, giving the overall plan of their work, and declaring their aims." The Hall of Three Pines begins in the 1890s, during the Chinese empire, and extends to the 1980s. According to Feng, "No age before was swept up in such a maelstrom of convoluted change." The son of a district magistrate, Feng left his home in 1910 at the age of fifteen to study in the provincial capital of Kaifeng and later at the China Academy in Shanghai. During the warlord and Kuomintang years, he graduated from Peking University, obtained a Ph.D. in philosophy under John Dewey at Columbia University, and became a professor of philosophy at several of Chin's most prestigious universities. Fleeing the Japanese invasion, Feng, along with many of his university colleagues, moved south to Changsha and Kunming. After Japan's surrender, he returned to teaching in Beijing and there witnessed the chaos of the Kuomintang-Communist civil war. Feng suffered the fate of many prominent intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution and was rehabilitated after Mao's death. His remaining years were spent in Beijing, at his long-time residence, The Hall of Three Pines, where he continued to work despite the gradual loss of his eyesight. Feng completed The Hall of Pines shortly before returning to the U.S. to receive an honorary degree from Columbia in 1982. The book is divided into three parts: The first is entitled "Society," which Feng describes as a record of his environment. "Philosophy" concerns Feng's work as an original philosopher and historian of Chinese philosophy and includes extensive excerpts from his own writings and discussions of these by himself and others. The final section, "Universities," is a discussion of education and delves into details of Chinese academic affairs. The Hall of Three Pines is a monumental work of personal and intellectual history spanning nearly nine decades in the life of modern China's one great philosopher.

The Qing state, driven by Confucian precepts of good government and urgent practical needs, committed vast resources to its granaries. Nourish the People traces the basic practices of this system, analyzes the organizational bases of its successes and failures, and examines variant practices in different regions. The volume concludes with an assessment of the granary system’s social and economic impact and historical comparison with the food supply policies of other states.

This path-breaking book argues that printing—both with woodblocks and with movable type—exerted a profound influence on Chinese society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Corruption is a preoccupation of governments and societies across place and time, from the 18th-19th Century British, Chinese, and Iberian empires to 20th Century Nazi Germany, Russia, the United States, and India. This study offers three different perspectives on corruption. The first chapters highlight corrupt practices, taking as a point of departure a technocratic definition of corruption. The second part of the book views corruption through the lens of discourses of corruption, revealing that accusations of corruption have been employed as tools, often in the context of contestations of power. The essays in the third part of the book treat corruption as a process, taking into account its causes and effects and their impact on society, economics, and politics. Contributors: Jeremy Adelman, Virginie Coulloudon, William Doyle, Diego Gambetta, Norman J. W. Goda, Robert Gregg, Michael Johnston, William Chester Jordan, Emmanuel Kreike, Vinod Pavarala, Dilip Simeon, Pierre-Etienne Will, David Witwer, Philip Woodfine William Chester Jordan is Professor of History at Princeton University; Emmanuel Kreike is Assistant Professor of African History and Director of the African Studies Program at Princeton University

This book is an attempt to clarify the history of San On County — the broader Hong Kong area — centring on the troubled years of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is based on an in-depth study of the San On County Gazetteer, which allows for a detailed discussion of the role, attitudes, and personalities of the San On magistrates, who were the heads of the county administration during this period. Particular focus is given to Zhou Xiyao (magistrate 1640–1644) and Li Kecheng (magistrate 1670–1675). The study finds that they, and at least some of the other magistrates of this period, were genuinely concerned about the county and its people, and tried as best they could to provide good and effective government for them.

Hailian Chen’s pioneering study presents the first comprehensive history of Chinese zinc—an essential base metal used to produce brass and coin and a global commodity—over the long eighteenth century. Zinc, she argues, played a far greater role in the Qing economy and in integrating China into an emerging global economy, than has previously been recognized. Using commodity chain analysis and exploring over 5,800 items of archival documents, Chen demonstrates how this metal was produced, transported, traded, and consumed by human agents. Situating the zinc story within the human-environment framework, this book covers a broad and interdisciplinary range of political economy, material culture, environment, technology, and society, which casts new light on our understanding of early modern China.

Blending fine-grained case studies with overarching theory, this book seeks both to integrate Southeast Asia into world history and to rethink much of Eurasia's premodern past. It argues that Southeast Asia, Europe, Japan, China, and South Asia all embodied idiosyncratic versions of a Eurasian-wide pattern whereby local isolates cohered to form ever larger, more stable, more complex political and cultural systems. With accelerating force, climatic, commercial, and military stimuli joined to produce patterns of linear-cum-cyclic construction that became remarkably synchronized even between regions that had no contact with one another. Yet this study also distinguishes between two zones of integration, one where indigenous groups remained in control and a second where agency gravitated to external conquest elites. Here, then, is a fundamentally original view of Eurasia during a 1,000-year period that speaks to both historians of individual regions and those interested in global trends.