Series: Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series

Dialogues in the Dark traces how Chinese readers and scholars since the Han dynasty have variously interpreted the ancient poem "Heavenly Questions" (Tianwen), an enigmatic work attributed to Qu Yuan (fl. ca. 300 BCE). The poem, composed entirely in the form of questions, is an extended inquiry into early Chinese cosmology and history. Over centuries, readers of the poem came...

As the territory of Qing China expanded, so evolved the ways in which birds, beasts, fish, trees, and flowers came to be known in the multilingual empire. The Manchu Mirrors and the Knowledge of Plants and Animals in High Qing China is the first systematic study of how the Qing court sought to codify Manchu and Chinese words for animals...

Endymion Wilkinson's bestselling Chinese History: A New Manual has been continuously in print for fifty years. It has achieved this unusual distinction because the author expanded its scope with each new edition. In the process, it has grown from a modest research guide to Chinese imperial history into an encyclopaedic, 1.7-million-word introduction to Chinese civilisation and the primary and secondary...

Health and the Art of Living offers reflections on health and illness in early medieval Chinese literature (ca. 200–ca. 600). Surveying a range of literary sources—essays, prefaces, correspondence, religious scriptures, and poetry—it explores the spectrum of views on health and illness expressed in these texts. Part One, centred on the essay "Nurturing the Vital Breath" in Liu Xie's Literary Mind...

Endymion Wilkinson's bestselling Chinese History: A New Manual has been continuously in print for fifty years. It has achieved this unusual distinction because the author expanded its scope with each new edition. In the process, it has grown from a modest research guide to Chinese imperial history into an encyclopedic, 1.7-million-word introduction to Chinese civilization and the primary and secondary...

Practitioners of any of the paths of self-cultivation available in ancient and medieval China engaged daily in practices meant to bring their bodies and minds under firm control. They took on regimens to discipline their comportment, speech, breathing, diet, senses, desires, sexuality, even their dreams. Yet, compared with waking life, dreams are incongruous, unpredictable—in a word, strange. How, then, did...

Practitioners of any of the paths of self-cultivation available in ancient and medieval China engaged daily in practices meant to bring their bodies and minds under firm control. They took on regimens to discipline their comportment, speech, breathing, diet, senses, desires, sexuality, and even their dreams. Yet, compared with waking life, dreams are incongruous and unpredictable—in a word, strange. How,...

By shedding light on a long-forgotten epigraphic genre that flourished in North China during the Mongol Empire, or Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368), Genealogy and Status explores the ways the conquered Chinese people understood and represented the alien Mongol ruling principles through their own cultural tradition. This epigraphic genre, which this book collectively calls genealogical steles, was quite unique in the history...

The Mongol conquest of north China between 1211 and 1234 inflicted terrible wartime destruction, wiping out more than one-third of the population and dismantling the existing social order. In the Wake of the Mongols recounts the riveting story of how northern Chinese men and women adapted to these trying circumstances and interacted with their alien Mongol conquerors to create a...

Dreaming is a near-universal human experience, but there is no consensus on why we dream or what dreams should be taken to mean. In this book, Robert Ford Campany investigates what people in late classical and early medieval China thought of dreams. He maps a common dreamscape—an array of ideas about what dreams are and what responses they should provoke—that...

What happens when historiography—the way historical events are committed to writing—shapes historical events as they occur? How do we read biography when it is truly "life-writing," with its subjects fully engaged with the historiographical rhetoric that would record their words and deeds? The Threshold, a study of the culture of historiography in early medieval China, explores these questions through the...

The long seventeenth century in China was a period of tremendous commercial expansion, and no literary genre was better equipped to articulate its possibilities than southern drama. As a form and a practice, southern drama was in the business of world-building—both in its structural imperative to depict and reconcile the social whole and in its creation of entire economies dependent...

For two millennia, Chinese society has been producing divine revelations on an unparalleled scale, in multifarious genres and formats. This book is the first comprehensive attempt at accounting for the processes of such production. It builds a typology of the various ritual techniques used to make gods present and allow them to speak or write, and it follows the historical...

Facing a transformed socio-political landscape after the An Lushan Rebellion (756–763), Tang dynasty elites questioned inherited understandings of tradition and anxiously reflected on their relations to both recent and ancient pasts. Du Fu (712–770), widely considered China's greatest poet, presciently addressed these concerns in his late work on memory and the means by which the past survives. In Elegies for...

Throughout the history of imperial China, the educated elite used various means to criticise government policies and actions. During the Song dynasty (960-1278), some members of this elite found an elegant and subtle means of dissent: landscape painting. By examining literary archetypes, the titles of paintings, contemporary inscriptions, and the historical context, Alfreda Murck shows that certain paintings expressed strong...

Taiwan has been depicted as an island facing the incessant threat of forcible unification with the People's Republic of China. Why, then, has Taiwan spent more than three decades pouring capital and talent into China? In the award-winning Rival Partners, Jieh-min Wu follows the development of Taiwanese enterprises in China over twenty-five years and provides fresh insights. The geopolitical shift...

Song Lyric, ci, remains one of the most loved forms of Chinese poetry. From the early eleventh century through the first quarter of the twelfth century, song lyric evolved from an impromptu contribution in a performance practice to a full literary genre, in which the text might be read more often than performed. Young women singers, either indentured or private...

Qingming shanghe (Up the River during Qingming), dubbed China’s Mona Lisa, is a painting whose primordial version is attributed to Zhang Zeduan, a painter who lived during the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127). It is so revered that to this day there exist more than one hundred handscroll paintings with this title, including the original and later versions produced during the...

In early modern China, a major revival of Buddhism coincided with a surging fascination with theatre. Buddhist monastics and laypeople increasingly participated in viewing, discussing, and writing plays. Far from merely serving as a medium for conveying religious teachings and practices, drama became a source of deep concern for Buddhists due to the perceived tension between spiritual discipline and worldly...

Flourishing Fasts is the first book in any language to explore the history of the Zhaijiao, commonly translated as "vegetarian sects," that originated in southeastern China during the Ming and Qing dynasties and are still active in contemporary Taiwan. Combining historical analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, Nikolas Broy reveals the entangled nature of the Zhaijiao—and other Chinese sectarian groups—within their socioreligious...