It is considered second only to the Tao Te Ching, but the two books coundn't be more different. Where the Tao Te Ching is distant and proverbial in style, the Chuang Tze buzzes with life and with insights, often with considerable humour behind them.

    This book features Li Po's work which is suffused with Taoism and Zen Buddhism.

    His "Shiji," or "Records of the Grand Historian," documents the history of China and its neighboring countries from the ancient past to his own time. These three volumes cover the Qin and Han dynasties.

    Beautiful line drawings show the various components that go into the making of perfect tea.

    Its poems, originating from the state of Chu and rooted in Shamanism, are grouped under 17 titles. The earliest poems were composed in the 4th century BC and almost half of them are traditionally ascribed to Qu Yuan. In his introduction to this edition, David Hawkes provides a discussion of the history of these poems and their context, styles and themes.

    His Shiji, or Records of the Grand Historian, documents the history of China and its neighboring countries from the ancient past to his own time. These three volumes cover the Qin and Han dynasties.

    "She was born in 844 and died in 868, at the age of twenty-four, condemned to death for the murder of her maid...We owe the survival of her forty-nine poems to the ancient Chinese anthologists' urge to be complete."The poems gathered in this bilingual (Chinese/English) edition will be read again and again for their beauty. The works preserve Yu Xuanji's passion, her sharp eye for detail, her often witty variations on familiar Chinese themes, all of which give the poems an immediacy one rarely finds in ancient, translated texts. Poems addressed to Yu Xuanji's husband and to other men (some famous poets) and women give us some sense of her relationships; the book also includes other traditional Chinese forms such as meditations on landscapes and occasional poems commemorating feast days. As noted in the introduction, the poetry also provokes us to think about the act of writing, about the culture and politics of the T'ang Dynasty, and about gender.

    "China: revolution and counterrevolution" is a unique contribution to the left, using a Marxist analysis to identify political and social trends in China 30 years after the introduction of capitalist market reforms.

    Here the historian is chronicling events he has witnessed and writing of the men he personally knows or has known. In Nagano Hozan's (1783-1837) words, "He makes us see in our minds the character of the men of the time, and this is why he is a great historian."

    A representative of the Fa-chia, or Legalist, school of philosophy, he produced the final and most readable exposition of its theories. Ironically, Han Fei Tzu's advice was heeded not by the king of Han but by the king of Ch'in, who, soon after ascending the throne in 246 B.C., conquered all of China and, as First Emperor of the Ch'in, established the Ch'in dynasty. Han Fei Tzu, sent as an envoy to Ch'in in 234 B.C., was at first welcomed by the king but later, on a royal minister's urging, was cast into prison, where he committed suicide. Han Fei Tzu's handbook for the ruler, which includes a few chapters for the guidance of his ministers, deals with the problem of preserving and strengthening the state. There are sections on the way of the ruler, on standards, on the use of power and of punishment and favor. Dangers to be avoided by the ruler are specified, as are precautions to be taken. Witty, trenchant, sophisticated, and cynical, the Han Fei Tzu has been read in every age. It retains its interest today when, perhaps more than ever before, men are concerned with the nature and use of power.

    The author has been teaching, consulting, and conducting training programs on this subject for more than 20 years. As an established worldwide authority on this subject, he has managed to distill the wisdom contained in the various quotations of Sun Zi and provided in-depth treatment on how to apply them to the modern world of business and strategic thinking. Topics covered include leadership, teamwork, dealing with competition, finding competitive niches, creativity and innovation, human resource management, and others. With the increased economic importance of China, more and more people are interested to know how the Chinese corporate strategists think, act, and behave. Being the oldest and most influential military classic that permeates Chinese society, Sun Zi Bingfa provides a very useful start for understanding the mindset of the Chinese. In the realm of business, the Chinese have always viewed that the business world is like a battlefield. This book provides a timely treatment of the subject in terms of how Sun Zi Bingfa can be meaningful applied to the world of business.

    George Macartney represented Britain at Kashgar from 1890 to 1918. Officially he was responsible for looking after the interests of the small British Indian community there, but unofficially he kept a watch on the activities of the Russians. For at that time Kashgar was Britain's most advanced position in the Great Game, the long and shadowy struggle with the Tsarist Russia for political and economic supremacy in Asia. Lady Macartney spent seventeen years in Kashgar and extended her hospitality to many famous travellers, among them Sir Aurel Stein, Albert von Le Coq and Dr G.E.Morrison. This book, first published in 1931, is a charming account of her life there and of the sometimes exotic customs of Turkestan. This edition is now reprinted with the addition of an Introduction by Peter Hopkirk, the author of three books on the Central Asian travellers. "Foreign Devils on the Silk Road", "Trespassers on the Roof of the World", and "Setting the East Ablaze".

    Which explains why, in Europe, everyone says that “all roads lead to Rome”.The reason empires like to build such arteries is to pull in commodities cheaply to the heart of the empire, and push out, at minimal cost, higher value-added finished goods to the periphery.With this analogy in mind, the world seems to increasingly be splitting along three empires:• The USA with its protectionist and isolationist president• Europe, whose territorial expansion seems to have stalled at the borders of Russia.• China, with its “One Belt, One Road” ambitions, a thinly disguised plan to tie Eurasia and Africa into China’s economic orbit.Clearly, Xi Jinping is on an imperial kick and, for him, in the 21st century, all roads must lead to Beijing.But building roads is the easy part of any imperial roll-out.Once the roads have been built, the safety of the goods and people travelling along them has to be ensured without creating resentment.Moreover, the empire must decide in which currency trade is taking place.Can China remain dependent on the willingness and ability of the American banks and government to fund its imperial ambitions ?Besides the fact that building an Empire on somebody else’s dime makes no sense, in the past couple of decades (Asian crisis of 1997, mortgage crisis of 2008, Taper Tantrum of 2013…), American banks have shown repeatedly that they were not reliable partners when it came to funding Asian trade. To be credible, an Empire must have its own reserve currency.The aim of this book is to think through the consequences of a world which increasingly seems to be splitting up into three zones, each with its own reserve currency, its own fiscal policy, its own ambitions and perhaps even its own supply chains.To go further: http://www.clashofempires.info

    The Leader Who is Hardly Known compiles a series of essays that begin with a brief story focusing on the experiences and lessons of a teacher called the Leader Who is Hardly Known. Following the story, the essay shares Taoist quotes and the author s thought that relate back to the story. Written in an order that emphasizes personality traits that affect leadership, commonalities to experiential education programs, then the necessity of connection to the natural world; the essays contained are intentionally short and can stand alone for reference and guidance. The conclusion summarizes how the principles contained form a foundational philosophy for experiential education.

    They were all volunteers and this was a very dangerous mission. Sixteen B-25 bombers took off from the deck of the USS Hornet, led by (then Col.) Jimmy Doolittle. They were to fly over Japan, drop their bombs and fly on to land in a part of China that was still free. Of course, things do not always go as planned. The months following the attack on Pearl Harbor were the darkest of the war, as Imperial Japanese forces rapidly extended their reach across the Pacific. Our military was caught off guard, forced to retreat, and losing many men in the fall of the Philippines, leading to the infamous Bataan Death March. By spring, 1942, America needed a severe morale boost. The raid on Tokyo on April 18, 1942, certainly provided that – cheering the American military and public. Yet, the Doolittle Raid meant so much more, proving to the Japanese high command that their home islands were not invulnerable to American attacks and causing them to shift vital resources to their defense. Two months later that decision would play a role in the outcome of the Battle of Midway, the American victory that would begin to turn the tide in the Pacific War.

    This new edition contains a number of the most relevant and accessible selections from that great classic.

    Economic prosperity also was vitally important to the longevity of the Chinese Empire throughout the preindustrial era. Before the eighteenth century, China's economy shared some of the features, such as highly productive agriculture and sophisticated markets, found in the most advanced regions of Europe. But in many respects, from the central importance of irrigated rice farming to family structure, property rights, the status of merchants, the monetary system, and the imperial state's fiscal and economic policies, China's preindustrial economy diverged from the Western path of development. In this comprehensive but accessible study, Richard von Glahn examines the institutional foundations, continuities and discontinuities in China's economic development over three millennia, from the Bronze Age to the early twentieth century.

    New Practical Chinese Reader is the most popular Chinese language learning text book in North America.

    

    This is an account of the travels in Central Asia and India of the seventh-century Chinese scholar-monk Xuanzang.

    As a whole, Fung's writings are the result of contact between Eastern and Western culture and of the modernization of Chinese philosophy. He investigates philosophy in the light of all of its cultural manifestations, taking the problem of life as his focus. Along such a trend and under the guidance of Professor John Dewey, he completed his doctoral dissertation, "A Comparative Study of Life Ideals," at Columbia University in 1923 (published in 1924). The work presents the young author's achievements in his endeavour to have a thorough knowledge of both Western and Chinese philosophy and their life ideals and to pursue the highest ideal of life as he saw it.

    

    

    

    A Fourteenth-Century Handscroll in The Metropolitan Museum of Art

    Chinese calligraphy is the quintessence of Chinese culture. When the ancient Orientals carved the earliest abstract symbols on the walls of their cave houses, and on animal bones and tortoise shells, their symbolic action marked the beginning of the Chinese written language and civilization. At the same time it indicated the beginning of the splendor of Chinese calligraphy. This is a beautifully soft bound book with inner flaps. It is filled with beautiful color and black and white photos. There are 18 chapters dealing with various strains of calligraphy such as "the beauty of strokes", "conveying the emotions of the author", Oracle bone inscriptions and inscriptions on ancient bronze objects," "two master of the Tang dynasty", and more. This is a China Cultural series and is published by the China Intercontinental Press. This will make a besutiful addition to your library.

    

    Describes the historical background of the poem and poses questions about Chinese mythology and the nature of the universe.

    That’s right. The Apocalypse. In a single blink Zombies appeared and mutated monsters began to rampage all throughout the world. Now it was the human species turn to fight for survival and planetary dominance! On the same day that the world descends into chaos we meet Yue Zhong. Initially only hoping to get to his friends and escape to a refugee camp our protagonist sets out, inadvertently building a team along the way. After a series of fortuitous events and a few serious hunches our hero decides it’s time to do more than just survive! Yue Zhong begins to form the foundations of an enormous survival plan… before he suddenly discovers that he has only gotten over the first hurdle….Unbeknownst to Yue Zhong and company, the world outside of China is mostly a wasteland! Country sized swathes of nuclear radiation and an extreme shortage of supplies in the world after the nuclear explosions was quickly becoming the “norm”. Mutants, Evolved animals and what’s worse, intelligent out of control dinosaurs had quickly appeared and claimed their own sections of the planet. There were several innately powerful Evolved races which appeared that were more than 10 times stronger than humans, nearly all of them possessing bodies impenetrable by normal bullets. The fabled orcs’ were another of these Evolved races, the leader of which had in fact enslaved many of the remaining human beings. Unceremoniously exposed to such a cold and heartless new world, Yue Zhong is faced with a choice: Find a deep dark hole and hope it goes back to “normal”? Or overcome all obstacles and struggle towards Evolution!!!

    Now the opposite is occurring: economic growth is ever more sluggish, while the stock market surges. Is the buoyant stock market a temporary aberration, "irrational exuberance", or a sign of profound change in China's financial system? Joe Studwell argues that China's experience echoes that of the other major East Asian economies: Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. Each of those countries went through a high-growth period characterized by intensive investment and by severe repression of financial markets. Financial repression was the tool governments used to ensure that national saving was channeled into the investments favored by the state's development strategy: infrastructure, basic industries and export oriented manufacturing. During this period equity-market returns stayed low even though economic growth was rapid. Eventually, each of these countries made the transition to more efficiency-driven growth. As they did so, financial markets were freed up and stock-market booms ensued, even as economic growth slowed to more sustainable levels. Today China is in the midst of a similar transition. The capital-intensive growth of the past is giving way to an economy driven more by services and consumer spending, and the government has undertaken broad reforms to increase efficiency and foster better capital allocation. In such an environment it is almost inevitable that investors in China's equity markets will enjoy far greater dividends from the growth of the world's second largest economy.

    The book is composed of 32 "books" or chapters covering philosophy, ethics, politics, military affairs, education, etc.. In this book Xunzi critically summarized the academic thinking of the naive materialism of ancient China and was against the belief of the mandate of heaven and blind worship of the supernatural. Opposing Mencius' belief that human nature is good, Xunzi held that human nature is evil, and was therefore for combining ritual principles and law and attaching equal importance to moral enlightenment and rule by law with its punishments and rewards. Besides praising the Earlier Kings, Xunzi initiated the idea of being modelled on the Later Kings, which was different from Confucius and Mencius. The English translation of this edition is the first complete English translation of Xunzi.

    Where the other Confucian classics treat “outward things: deeds, moral precepts, the way the world works,” as Stephen Owen tells us in his foreword, The Book of Songs is “the classic of the human heart and the human mind.”

    Female, Male, Dragon, Tigersword2. Slaughter of Qingcheng3. Man of the Storm4. Returning Hunter5. Invincible

    

    

    Now Jin turns her considerable talents to short fiction, in ten thematically linked stories.Written during the turbulent years of the Trump administration and the first year of the pandemic, these stories explore intimacy and isolation, coming-of-age and coming to terms with the repercussions of past mistakes, fraying relationships and surprising moments of connection. Moving between San Francisco and China, and from unsparing realism to genre-bending delight, Self-Portrait with Ghost considers what it means to live in an age of heightened self-consciousness, seemingly endless access to knowledge, and little actual power.Page-turning, thought-provoking, and wholly unique, Self-Portrait with Ghost further establishes Meng Jin as a writer who "reminds us that possible explanations in our universe are as varied as the beings who populate it" (Paris Review).

    

    Our experiences, observations, and accumulated knowledge have been recorded with the sincere hope that such remarkable traditional crafts continue to be handed down through future generations."

    

    

    c. under the patronage of Lü Buwei, prime minister to the ruler of the state of Qin, who was to become the first emperor of a newly unified China fifteen years later. Lü retained a group of scholars whose aim was to encompass the world’s knowledge in one great encyclopedia; so delighted was Lü with the finished work that he is said to have offered a fabulous prize of gold to anyone who could add or subtract even a single word.An exceptionally rich and comprehensive compendium, The Annals of Lü Buwei recounts in engaging, straightforward, and readable prose the great variety of beliefs and customs of its time. The work is one of the great monuments of Chinese thinking, a work of originality and cohesion, inspired by a vision of a universal empire ruled by principles that ensured harmony between man and nature, protective of human and animal life, devoted to learning and culture, practicing benevolence and kindness, and motivated by reason and morality.In addition to revealing an advanced state of technical knowledge, the Annals set forth a philosophy of government suitable to the centralized control that the Qin state would subsequently establish. It also took into account every philosophical trend of the day, sometimes adapting themes, sometimes combining ideas that had not previously been associated, sometimes rejecting and refuting positions that were in conflict with its basic vision. Because Lü aimed at comprehensiveness, his work preserved a number of systems of thought that are otherwise unknown or scarcely known. The Annals thus provides an essential tool for anyone seeking to reconstruct the philosophical controversies of the third century b. c. At the same time, Lü’s compendium proclaims his independent, highly original philosophical positions. Today, with most of the works of classical Chinese philosophy long lost, The Annals of Lü Buwei remains indispensable as a summa of the Chinese intellectual world of its time.

    

    

    

    ]ReviewChong Suk-Wai, The Straits Times, Lifestyle Section, "China Blowing Hot and Cold," 28 March 2017. http://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle..."Dr Leo Suryadinata has been tracking Beijing's shifts in policy towards non-mainland Chinese since the 1970s, so he has the long view on the subject. Better yet, he is adept in Chinese, Bahasa Indonesia and English, the three languages which enable him to note and decode the nuances and niceties of political shadow play between China and its neighbours. His book is required reading if one wants to grasp these fraught ties firmly."About the PublicationWith the rise of China and massive new migrations, China has adjusted its policy towards the Chinese overseas in Southeast Asia and beyond. This book deals with Beijing's policy which has been a response to the external events involving the Chinese overseas as well as the internal needs of China. It appears that a rising China considers the Chinese overseas as a source of socio-political and economic capital and would extend its protection to them whenever this is not in conflict with its core national interest. The impacts on and the responses of the relevant countries, especially those in Southeast Asia, are also examined.

    Vivid narration of her every day life—every detail of her household, its people, architectural layouts of the courtyards, living arrangements and styles from a Westerner in China—gives us such insight into the life of an American living in China.