Bücher der Reihe Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature and Institutions

Poetry and Politics is the first full-length study in any language of the life and works of the Chinese poet and thinker, Juan Chi (AD 210-263). This book contains translations of all Juan Chi's important works, in verse and prose, his letters and all the historical accounts of his life. The reader is thus enabled, for the first time in a work of this kind, to see a Chinese writer in the round, in his works and in his setting. Juan Chi's attachment to traditional Confucian values kept him in the centre of political and social life, but eventually his disgust with the disloyalty and self-seeking he saw in Wei society made him turn away. He attempted in Taoism and in the pursuit of Taoist immortality to find the purity and permanence so lacking in the world, but without an ultimate commitment. Juan Chi was accused both in his lifetime and subsequently of being a Confucian hero and a Taoist iconoclast, and in him can be seen the contradictory intellectual and religious forces t hat were slowly bringing in the Chinese Middle Ages.

Originally published in 1974, this is a detailed study of the financial administration of the Chinese government during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), with particular attention to the sixteenth century, a topic about which very little has been published either in Chinese or any Western language. Professor Huang has worked through an enormous quantity and variety of source material - in particular the 133 substantial volumes of the Ming Veritable Records - and has compared the documents on financial matters with the entries in local gazetteers. The complicated workings of government finance present great difficulties to all specialists in Chinese financial and administrative history and in different branches of local Chinese history from the fifteenth century onwards. Professor Huang's study will provide all such researchers with an authoritative work of reference.

This 2002 book argues that the Mongol invasion of China in the thirteenth century precipitated a lasting transformation of marriage and property law that deprived women of their property rights and reduced their legal and economic autonomy. It evaluates the Mongol invasion and its influence on Chinese law and society.

Buddhism Under the Tang is a history of the Buddhist Church during the T'ang dynasty (618-907), when Buddhist thought reached the pinnacle of its development.

The author explains both fluctuations in policy and discrepancies between plans and reality and examines the mechanisms of wage determination. In so doing, he makes it clear that even in a highly planned society there are some limits to what is possible in the regulation of wages and incomes.

This book provides an important contribution to the economic history of modern China. It examines the history of the coal mining industry - one of China's largest and most important - from the beginnings of modernisation around 1895 to the start of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937.

This is a study of landholding, taxation and social structure in one county of central China that became famous in the Ming and Ch'ing periods for producing great officials and remarkable intellectual traditions. The primary aim of the author is to investigate the composition, organisation and economic basis of the local elite.

The book is a literary study of one of the greatest of Chinese writers, Ou-yang Hsiu. He was a major writer in each of several genres: prose, poetry, rhapsodies, and tz'u 'songs'. The striking diversity of his work presents an opportunity to investigate how one man's literary talent is manifested in different genres.

Fu Ssu-nien, the Chinese scholar, educator, and political and social critic, was one of the most colorful and influential intellectual figures in twentieth-century China. Wang Fan-sen's biography of Fu's extraordinary life and contributions offers an in-depth look at his role in intellectual and educational development in modern China.

Norman Kutcher's study of mourning looks beneath the rhetoric to demonstrate how Qing China's Manchu leaders - unwilling to make the sacrifices that a genuine commitment to proper mourning demanded - quietly but forcefully undermined, not reinvigorated, the Confucian mourning system.

Thomas Buoye examines the impact of large-scale economic change on social conflict in eighteenth-century China. He draws upon a large body of documented violent property disputes to recreate the social tensions fostered by the growth of property rights in land, a population explosion, and the increasing strain on land and resources.

Originally published in 1972, this is a detailed examination of the policy of the People's Republic of China towards the overseas Chinese.

This book is a study of the poetry of Huang Zunxian, one of the most famous authors of late nineteenth-century China. The first part consists of a detailed biography outlining Huang's literary and political career; the second, of a critical discussion of Huang's poetry. The book concludes with a generous sampling of his poetry in translation.

Stone Lake is a translation and study of the poetry of Fan Chengda, one of the most famous Chinese poets. Along with translations of Fan Chengda's poetry, this 1992 book also contains a biography of the poet and a discussion of his relationship with poets of the generation before him, and discussion of the major themes of his work.

This book describes how the Chinese government, between about 620 and 850, developed an official organization designed to select, process, and edit material for inclusion in official historical works eventually to be incorporated in an official history of the dynasty. There is no comparable work in any language, including Chinese.

Professor Chou here offers a new perspective on the rise and fall of the Kung-an school as a key to understanding the development of Chinese literary criticism in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. His book focuses upon the literary theories of Yuan Hung-tao (1568-1610) and his two brothers.

Tun-huang Popular Narratives presents the only surviving primary evidence of a widespread and flourishing world of popular entertainment during these centuries. The tales deal with both religious (mostly Buddhist) and secular themes, and make exciting and vivid reading.

Wong reveals the extent of Britain's reliance on the opium and tea trade with China, and argues that Victorian free trade ideology was a less decisive factor in the Arrow War (1856-60) than was Britain's economic struggle to support a vast colonial enterprise.

The remains of Tai Fu's lost collection Kuang-i chi ('The Great Book of Marvels') preserve three hundred short tales of encounters with the other world. This study develops a style of close reading through which those tales give access to the lives of individuals in eighth-century China.

Tu Fu is, by universal consent, is the greatest poet of the Chinese tradition and the epitome of the Chinese moral conscience at its highest. Eva Shan Chou investigates the evolution of his stature as an icon, and provides translations of many poems, both well known and obscure.

One of the major eleventh-century Chinese philosophers, Chang Tsai helped to reinvigorate Confucian thought. This book analyses in depth Chang's views of man, his nature and endowments, the cosmos, heaven and earth, the problems of learning and self-cultivation, the ideal of the sage - and how that ideal might be attained.

Between 1937 and 1941, terrorist wars broke out between Nationalist secret agents and the assassins of the Japanese military authorities who occupied most of Shanghai. The release of secret Chinese police files exposes the inner workings of these groups and their links to the Green Gang for the first time.

The contribution of the overseas Chinese, particularly from Southeast Asia (Nanyang), to China's early modernization constitutes an important and neglected chapter in Chinese history. This study traces the rise of overseas Chinese capitalism together with the emergence of an aggressive campaign on the Ch'ing dynasty to attract overseas support.

This study offers an interpretation of the origins of the T'ang-Sung intellectual tradition.

This work is the first comprehensive study of law enforcement in traditional China. The depth and rigour to which the subject is treated makes it invaluable in the study of Chinese society or law and order.

The author explains the contributions of Li Fu to the Lu-Wang school of Confucianism, and gives a clear, succinct account of the Lu-Wang and Ch'eng-Chu schools from the twelfth century to the eighteenth.

Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, this book shows how the civil war of 1924 opened the way for radical nationalism, deeply affecting the Chinese economy, society, politics, and foreign relations, and ultimately Chinese feelings about what should be changed in their society.

This radical reinterpretation of the formative stages of Chinese culture and history traces the central role played by cosmology in the formation of China's early empires. It crosses the disciplines of history, social anthropology, archaeology and philosophy to illustrate how cosmological systems shaped political culture.

Every general account of the development of Chinese thought makes mention of Tung Chung-shu (195-105 bce) as one of the pivotal philosophers of the Han. This book represents the most systematic account yet of Tung Chung-shu's importance in Chinese philosophy and religion.

Community, Trade, and Networks traces the economic and demographic history of a corner of China's southeast coast from the third to the thirteenth century, investigating the relationship between changes in the agrarian and urban economies of the area and the expanding role of domestic and foreign trade.