Series: Harvard East Asian Monographs

Once a powerful figure who reversed the disintegration of China and steered the country to Allied victory in World War II, Chiang Kai-shek fled into exile following his 1949 defeat in the Chinese Civil War. As attention pivoted to Mao Zedong's communist experiment, Chiang was relegated to the dustbin of history. In Chiang Kai-shek's Politics of Shame, Grace C. Huang...

Ezra F. Vogel was one of America's foremost experts on Asia, mastering the Japanese and Chinese languages and contributing important scholarly works on both countries, and on their relationships with each other and with the world. Starting from modest roots in an immigrant family in a small town in Ohio, he came to Harvard in 1953 to train as a...

War, defeat, and the collapse of empire in 1945 touched every aspect of postwar Japanese society, profoundly shaping how the Japanese would reconstruct national identity and reengage with the peoples of Asia. While "America" offered a vision of re-genesis after cataclysmic ruin, "Asia" exposed the traumata of perpetration and the torment of ethnic responsibility. Obscured in the shadows of a...

Building a Nation at War argues that the Chinese Nationalist government's retreat inland during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), its consequent need for inland resources, and its participation in new scientific and technical relationships with the United States led to fundamental changes in how the Nationalists engaged with science and technology as tools to promote development. The war catalysed an emphasis...

Cornerstone of the Nation is the first historical account of the complex alliance of military and civilian forces that catapulted South Korea's conjoined militarisation and industrialisation under Park Chung Hee (1961–1979). Kwon reveals how Park's secret programme to build an independent defence industry spurred a total mobilisation of business, science, labour, and citizenry, all of which converged in military-civilian forces...

Histories of remote islands around Japan are usually told through the prism of territorial disputes. In contrast, Takahiro Yamamoto contends that the transformation of the islands from ambiguous border zones to a territorialised space emerged out of multilateral power relations. Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, Tsushima, the Bonin Islands, and the Ryukyu Islands became the subject of inter-imperial negotiations during the...

Give and Take offers a new history of government in Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868), one that focuses on ordinary subjects: merchants, artisans, villagers, and people at the margins of society such as outcastes and itinerant entertainers. Most of these individuals are now forgotten and do not feature in general histories except as bystanders, protesters, or subjects of exploitation. Yet despite their...

Commercial aviation took shape in Hong Kong as the city developed into a powerful economy. Rather than accepting air travel as an inevitability in the era of global mobility, John Wong argues that Hong Kong's development into a regional and global airline hub was not preordained. By underscoring the shifting process through which this hub emerged, Hong Kong Takes Flight...

Inked is a social history of common soldiers of the Song Dynasty, most of whom would have been recognised by their tattooed bodies. Overlooked in the historical record, tattoos were an indelible aspect of the Song world, and their ubiquity was tied to the rise of the penal–military complex, a vast system for social control, warfare, and labour. Although much...

The popularisation of basic legal knowledge is an important and contested technique of state governance in China today. Its roots reach back to the early years of Chinese Communist Party rule. Legal Lessons tells the story of how the party-state attempted to mobilise ordinary citizens to learn laws during the early years of the Mao period (1949–1976) and in the...

The Qing dynasty office purchase system (juanna), which allowed individuals to pay for appointments in the government, was regarded in traditional Chinese historiography as an inherently corrupt and anti-meritocratic practice. It enabled participants to become civil and military officials while avoiding the competitive government-run examination systems. Lawrence Zhang's groundbreaking study of a broad selection of new archival and other printed...

The Making of China's Post Office traces the origins and early development of the country's modern postal system. Sweeping in perspective, it goes beyond the bounds of institutional history to explore the political manoeuvrings, economic imperatives, and societal pressures both inhibiting and driving forward postal development. Although its prime mover was Robert Hart, Inspector General of the Chinese Maritime Customs...

Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine investigates the administrative revolution of China's eighteenth-century Qing state. It begins in the mid-seventeenth century with what seemed, at the time, to be straightforward policies to clean up the bureaucracy: a regulation about deadlines here, a requirement about reporting standards there. Over the course of a hundred years, the central court continued to demand...

Grounded in extensive fieldwork and archival research, Echoes from the Sino-Burmese Borderlands is an ethnography that explores the clandestine travel of primarily Yunnanese Chinese migrants via the Sino-Burmese borderlands during the Cold War. Wen-Chin Chang probes their political, economic, and sociocultural trajectories, including their engagement in Taiwan's espionage in Burma, military operations of the Communist Party of Burma, mule transport...

Shinto Shrines in Prewar and Wartime Japan examines the religious and social history of Shinto shrines, focusing on the economic, social, and ideological implications of State Shinto. Helen Hardacre argues that politicians regarded public funding of shrines as crucial for elevating their "dignity" and for curbing progressive thought and activism. Understanding the social and financial dynamics of both major and...

After the abolition of the imperial examination system in 1905, what made examinations a trusted method of selection in China and Taiwan? Reinventing Examination and the State traces the ideological evolution of civil service and state-organized educational examinations in twentieth-century China and Taiwan. In the making of the modern Chinese civil service, the concept of examination as a basic power...

In the late 1980s, most of the world still associated Vietnam with resistance and war, hardship, refugees, and a mismanaged planned economy. During the 1990s, by contrast, major countries began to see Vietnam as both a potential partner and a strategically significant actor—particularly in the competition between the United States and an emerging China—and international investors began to see Vietnam...

Sacred Journeys and Institutional Rivalries is a detailed and richly illustrated exploration of pilgrimage mandalas (sankei mandara). These large-scale, brightly coloured landscape paintings, which appeared in late-medieval Japan, present aerial views of sacred sites, the roads leading to them, and the rites performed there. Carried by itinerant monks and nuns throughout the country, pilgrimage mandalas were used in lively narrative...

Webtoons—a form of comic that are typically published digitally in chapter form—are the latest manifestation of the Korean Wave of popular culture that has increasingly caught on across the globe, especially among youth. Originally distributed via the Internet, they are now increasingly distributed through smartphones to ravenous readers in Korea and around the world. The rise of webtoons has fundamentally...

From Tanzania to Malaysia, Russia to Iran, author Eyck Freymann takes readers inside China's One Belt One Road, the largest global infrastructure development programme in history. In this authoritative and accessible book, Freymann argues that OBOR is not the centralised and systematic investment policy that many commentators have made it out to be. Rather, it is a largely aspirational and...

Webtoons—a form of comic that is typically published digitally in chapter form—are the latest manifestation of the Korean Wave of popular culture that has increasingly caught on across the globe, especially among youth. Originally distributed via the Internet, they are now increasingly distributed through smartphones to ravenous readers in Korea and around the world. The rise of webtoons has fundamentally...

Drawing on both contemporaneous historical sources and modern literary criticism, Navigating Narratives offers unique insights into Heian Japan through a close reading of one of its most enigmatic and consequential texts. Named after the province once governed by its creator, Ki no Tsurayuki (d. 946), Tosa nikki (The Tosa Diary) purports to be the record of a voyage kept by...

The second edition of An Introduction to Literary Chinese incorporates recent developments in linguistics and has been expanded to include a lesson on Buddhist texts. Beginning with an overview of literary Chinese—its phonology, morphology, and syntax, as well as a short account of the nature of the writing system—the textbook then presents thirty-six lessons of increasing difficulty designed to introduce...

In Strange Tales from Edo, William Fleming paints a sweeping picture of Japan's engagement with Chinese fiction in the early modern period (1600–1868). Large-scale analyses of the full historical and bibliographical record—the first of their kind—document in detail the wholesale importation of Chinese fiction, the market for imported books and domestic reprint editions, and the critical role of manuscript practices,...

Once the exclusive domain of the aristocracy, classical Japanese poetry (waka) underwent a remarkable transformation in the medieval period, becoming a dynamic tool for cultural education embraced by warriors, monks, merchants, and commoners alike. Ariel Stilerman investigates this evolution in Court Poetry and the Culture of Learning in Japan by examining not only poetic treatises but also overlooked genres such...

What happens when performance defies social and political boundaries? Performing Transgression offers a new cultural history of non-elite spectacle in Heian Japan (794-1185), uncovering how performances on the margins—boisterous dengaku music and dance, daring sangaku acrobatics, and the infectious lyrics of imayō songs—challenged and fascinated the aristocracy. Ashton Lazarus reveals how these unruly arts were documented by the very elites...

Chinese ink painters of the Republican period (1911–1949) creatively engaged with a range of art forms in addition to ink, such as oil painting, drawing, photography, and woodblock prints. They transformed their medium of choice in innovative ways, reinterpreting both its history and its theoretical foundations. Juliane Noth offers a new understanding of these compelling experiments in Chinese painting by...

"Autumn wind, autumn rain, fill my heart with sorrow"—these were the last words of Qiu Jin (1875–1907), written before she was beheaded for plotting to overthrow the Qing empire. Eventually, she would be celebrated as a Republican martyr and China's first feminist, her last words committed to memory by schoolchildren. Yet during her lifetime she was often seen as eccentric,...

The second edition of An Introduction to Literary Chinese incorporates recent developments in linguistics and has been expanded to include a lesson on Buddhist texts. Beginning with an overview of literary Chinese—its phonology, morphology, and syntax, as well as a short account of the nature of the writing system—the textbook then presents thirty-six lessons of increasing difficulty designed to introduce...

Until 300 years ago, the Chinese considered Taiwan a "land beyond the seas," a "ball of mud" inhabited by "naked and tattooed savages." The incorporation of this island into the Qing empire in the seventeenth century and its evolution into a province by the late nineteenth century involved not only a reconsideration of imperial geography but also a reconceptualization of...

The poetry of the Late Tang often looked backward, and many poets of the period distinguished themselves through the intensity of their retrospective gaze. Chinese poets had always looked backward to some degree, but for many Late Tang poets the echoes and the traces of the past had a singular aura. In this work, Stephen Owen resumes telling the literary...

In this history of Japanese involvement in northeast China, the author argues that Japan's military seizure of Manchuria in September 1931 was founded on three decades of infiltration of the area. This incremental empire-building and its effect on Japan are the focuses of this book. The principal agency in the piecemeal growth of Japanese colonisation was the South Manchurian Railway...

Amid the political turmoil of China’s Cultural Revolution, a small group of painters in Beijing defied state control, creating art in secrecy that challenged the ideological constraints of their time. Painting into Being is the first in-depth study of underground art during this period, focusing on the Wuming (No Name) Painting Group, active from 1972 to 1981, in conjunction with...

The Mongol Empire changed the world, but early chronicles of its conquests, written from regional perspectives and widely dispersed, could not convey its far-reaching significance. The Khan and the Unicorn details how historians from different cultures collectively rediscovered their common past and transformed the scattered records of Chinggis Khan’s conquests into world history. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as...

Here is the first full-length biography in English of the most important political figure in premodern Japan. Hideyoshi—peasant turned general, military genius, and imperial regent of Japan—is the subject of an immense legendary literature. He is best known for the conquest of Japan's sixteenth-century warlords and the invasion of Korea. He is known, too, as an extravagant showman who rebuilt...

In The Promised Republic, Russell Burge offers a bold new history of South Korea’s rapid development. By focusing on the experience of rural-to-urban migrants who built and lived in Seoul’s shantytowns, Burge historicises national development as a site of struggle with the urban poor at its centre. What would a society of postcolonial abundance look like? Who was this society...

"In a government, military matters are the essential thing," said Japan's Heavenly Warrior, the Emperor Temmu, in 684. Heavenly Warriors traces in detail the evolutionary development of weaponry, horsemanship, military organisation, and tactics from Japan's early conflicts with Korea up to the full-blown system of the samurai. Enhanced by illustrations and maps, and with a new preface by the author,...