Best of
China

1989

The Selected Poems of Tu Fu


Du Fu - 1989
    In addition to making formal innovations in language and structure, he extended the range of acceptable subject matter to include all aspects of public and private experience, thus becoming in the words of translator David Hinton, “the first complete poetic sensibility in Chinese literature.”This edition of The Selected Poems of Tu Fu is the only comprehensive selection of the poet's work currently available in English. While retaining a scholar's devotion to the text, Hinton has attempted “to recreate Tu Fu's poems as new systems of uncertainty." By reflecting all the ambiguity and density of the originals, he has created compelling English poems that significantly alter our conception of Chinese poetry. Included with the poems are the translator’s introduction and translation principles. as well as a biography of Tu Fu; together these provide a fascinating portrait of a uniquely sensitive spirit during one of the most tumultuous periods in Chinese history.

China: Empire of Living Symbols


Cecilia Lindqvist - 1989
    To his surprise the bone, which had not yet been ground into powder, contained a number of carved inscriptions. Thus began the discovery of the 3000 year old sources of the written characters still in use in China today.In this unparalleled and beautiful book, Cecilia Lindqvist tells the fascinating story of these origins, and shows how their shapes and concepts permeate Chinese thought, architecture, art and culture. Illustrations in two-colour throughout, and a four-colour insert, make vivid each stage of the story, and the beauty of the characters themselves.

The King of Trees: Three Novellas: The King of Trees, The King of Chess, The King of Children


Ah Cheng - 1989
    Never before had a fiction writer dealt with the Cultural Revolution in such Daoist-Confucian terms, discarding Mao-speak, and mixing both traditional and vernacular elements with an aesthetic that emphasized not the hardships and miseries of those years, but the joys of close, meaningful friendships. In The King of Chess, a student’s obsession with finding worthy chess opponents symbolizes his pursuit of the dao; in The King of Children—made into an award-winning film by Chen Kaige, the director of Farewell My Concubine—an educated youth is sent to teach at an impoverished village school where one boy’s devotion to learning is so great he is ready to spend 500 days copying his teacher’s dictionary; and in the title novella a peasant’s innate connection to a giant primeval tree takes a tragic turn when a group of educated youth arrive to clear the mountain forest. The King of Trees is a masterpiece of world literature, full of passion and noble emotions that stir the inner chambers of the heart.

Dialogues in Paradise


Can Xue - 1989
    The work of Can Xue (a pseudonym of Changsa writer Deng Xiao-hua) renews our consciousness of the long tradition of the irrational in our literature, where dreams and reality constitute one territory, its borders open, the passage back and forth barely discernible. She fuses lyrical purity with the darkest visions of the grotesque and the result is a unique literary experience.

City of Lingering Splendour: A Frank Account of Old Peking's Exotic Pleasures


John Blofeld - 1989
    Arriving in 1934, he found a city imbued with the atmosphere of the recent imperial past and haunted by the powerful spirit of the late Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi. He entered a world of magnificent palaces and temples of the Forbidden City, of lotus-covered lakes and lush pleasure-gardens, of bustling bazaars and peaceful bathhouses, and of "flower houses" with their beautiful young courtesans versed in the arts of pleasing men. With a novelists' command of detail and dialogue, Blofeld vividly re-creates the magic of these years and conveys to the reader his appreciation and nostalgia for a way of life long vanished.

The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China


Thomas J. Barfield - 1989
    Why and how they did so and to what effect are the themes of this history of the nomadic tribes of Inner Asia - the Mongols, Turks, Uighurs and others, collectively dubbed the Barbarians by the Chinese and the Europeans. This two-thousand year history of the nomadic tribes is drawn from a wide range of sources and told with unprecedented clarity and pace. The author shows that to describe the tribes as barbaric is seriously to underestimate their complexity and underlying social stability. He argues that their relationship with the Chinese was as much symbiotic as parasitic and that they understood their dependence on a strong and settled Chinese state. He makes sense of the apparently random rise and fall of these mysterious, obscure and fascinating nomad confederacies.

The Immobile Empire


Alain Peyrefitte - 1989
    In 1793, a group of nearly 700 men attempted to establish relations with China. But the refusal of their leader to "kowtow" to the emperor was the first signal that the empires would fail to see eye to eye. Illustrations.

Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China


A.C. Graham - 1989
    It is comprehensive, lucid, almost simple in its presentation, yet backed up with incomparable authority amid a well-honed discretion that unerringly picks out the core of any theme. Garlanded with tributes even before publication, it has redrawn the map of its subject and will be the one essential guide for any future exploration. For anyone interested in the affinities between ancient Chinese and modern Western philosophy, there is no better introduction."—Contemporary Review

Chinese Art of Writing


Jean François Billeter - 1989
    

5000 Years Of Chinese Costumes


Xun Yu Zhou - 1989
    "This beautifully designed and printed volume is one of the best".--The New York Times.

Treasures of China


Reader's Digest Association - 1989
    TREASURES OF CHINA offers a rare and intimate glimpse into the beautiful landscape and richly diverse cultures that have shaped one of the world's oldest civilizations.

Ethics in the Confucian Tradition: The Thought of Mengzi and Wang Yangming


Philip J. Ivanhoe - 1989
    By examining issues held in common by both thinkers, Ivanhoe illustrates how the Confucian tradition was both continued and transformed by Wang Yangming, and shows the extent to which he was influenced by Buddhism. Topics explored are: the nature of morality; human nature; the nature and origin of wickedness; self cultivation; and sagehood. In addition to revised versions of each of these original chapters, Ivanhoe includes a new chapter on Kongzi's (Confucius') view of the Way.

The Collision of Two Civilsations


Alain Peyrefitte - 1989
    Fascinating book about the Britich Expedition to China in 1792-1794.

China Turning Inward: Intellectual-Political Changes in the Early Twelfth Century


James T.C. Liu - 1989
    The intellectual climate of the Northern Sung had been confident, buoyant, outreaching, and exploratory; in the Southern Sung, it turned inward. The turn was not, however, a simple turn to conservative moral and political Confucianism; and in this book, James T. C. Liu explores how Kao-tsung used ideological window-dressing to consolidate extraordinary state power in the emperor's hands. Ups and downs in the political fortunes of moralistic conservatives are also specially examined for their effects on the nature of the Neo-Confucianism that eventually became state orthodoxy.

The Poetry of Enlightenment: Poems by Ancient Chan Masters


聖嚴法師 - 1989
    Here a modern master presents ten teaching poems from the ancient masters, with illuminating commentary. “These poems flow directly from the minds of the enlightened Chan masters,” Master Sheng Yen says. “We get a glimpse into their experience at the time of, and after, their enlightenment. It is my hope that this collection of poems will give those who are interested in the practice a new way of looking at Chan.”

Confucius


Yasushi Inoue - 1989
    His novel Confucius (Koshi) topped sales of 700,000 copies in its first year of publication. The story is told through the eyes of Yen-chiang, a fictitious disciple of the Master, who, in his advanced years, lectures a younger generation of followers. Yen-chiang rescues Confucius from the obscurity of the past with a series of vivid set pieces. He guides his listeners - and the reader - across the vast Chinese landscape and the turmoil of the warring states on an intimate journey with the Sage. The brilliantly crafted historical narrative is interwoven with famous lines from the Analects, immortalized through the centuries. Tantalizing glimpses of Confucius himself flicker from the pages, his extraordinariness harmonizing with his humanness. An elusive yet lifelike portrait of Confucius emerges. At the same time the novel provides a stimulating introduction to the great philosopher for readers uninitiated in Far Eastern thought, and a refreshing new perspective for the veteran Sinologist.

Understanding The Chinese Mind: The Philosophical Roots


Robert E. Allinson - 1989
    The result is a unified volume which makes an invaluable contribution to the hermeneutics of cross-cultural interpretation as well to the investigation of the unique features of both Chinese philosophy and the Chinese mind. The distinguished contributors include John E. Smith, Robert C. Neville, Chad Hansen, Christoph Harbsmeier, Chung-ying Chen, Antonio S. Cua, Kuang-Ming Wu, and Lao Sze-kwang (Lao Yung-wei). A comprehensive bibliography of both Chinese and Western language sources is included, making this an essential reference for students and scholars of Chinese philosophy and East-West comparative philosophy.

A White Man's Province: British Columbia Politicians and Chinese and Japanese Immigrants 1858-1914


Patricia E. Roy - 1989
    Roy is the winner of the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award, Canadian Historical Association.A White Man’s Province examines how British Columbians changed their attitudes towards Asian immigrants from one of toleration in colonial times to vigorous hostility by the turn of the century and describes how politicians responded to popular cries to halt Asian immigration and restrict Asian activities in the province.

State and Peasant in Contemporary China: The Political Economy of Village Government


Jean C. Oi - 1989
    To provide the reader with a clearer sense of the evolution of peasant-state relations over almost a forty-year period and to highlight the dramatic changes that have taken place since 1978,1 have divided my analysis into two parts: Chapters 2 through 7 are on Maoist China, and chapters 8 and 9 are on post-Mao China. The first part examines the state's grain policies and patterns of local politics that emerged during the highly collectivized Maoist period, when the state closed free grain markets and established the system of unified purchase and sales (tonggou tongxiao). The second part describes the new methods for the production and division of the harvest after 1978, when the government decollectivized agriculture and abolished its unified procurement program.

Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796-1895


William T. Rowe - 1989
    In the first volume, Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796-1889 (1984), the author emphasized the dynamism of late imperial commerce, the relation of the metropolis to its hinterland, and the corporate institutions of the city, notably its guilds, which assumed a number of functions we normally attribute to a municipal government. In this volume, the focus is on the people of Hankow, in all their ethnic diversity, occupational variety, and constant mobility, and on the social bonds that enabled this mass of people to live and work in a crowded city with much less disruptive social conflict than occurred in Hankow's counterparts in early modern Europe.Built into the argument of the book is a running comparison nineteenth-century Hankow with such cities as London and Paris in the somewhat earlier period when they, too, were experiencing the growing pains of nascent preindustrial capitalism. How are we to account for the fact that the cities of early modern Europe were so much more prone to protest and social upheaval than Hankow was in a comparable stage of development? The author finds the answer in the cultural hegemony of an activist elite that fostered moral consensus, social harmony, and an aura of solicitude for the well-being of residents at every social level, exemplified in such service institutions as poor relief, firefighting, and public security.Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, the social bonds that had held Hankow together were beginning to fragment, as social polarization and growing class-consciousness fostered an atmosphere of increasing unrest.

Mi-Lou: Poetry and the Labyrinth of Desire


Stephen Owen - 1989
    He argues that comparisons need cross cultures and time periods. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Inside Stories of the Forbidden City


Er Si - 1989
    

Fragrant Harbour Taste: The New Chinese Cooking Of Hong Kong


Ken Hom - 1989
    From the renowned author of Chinese Technique and Ken Hom's East Meets West Cuisine, here is the first cookbook to explore the exciting new cuisine of Hong Kong, a light and gloriously favorful melange of traditional Asian and Western tastes.

Neo-Confucian Education: The Formative Stage


William Theodore de Bary - 1989
    Today, with frequent comparisons between the rapid success at modernization of many of these societies and the slowness of other underdeveloped countries, Neo-Confucianism has come to be seen under a very different light; analysts now point to the common Confucian culture of China, Japan, Korea, and overseas Chinese communities as a driving force in the East Asian peoples' receptivity to new learning, disciplined industriousness, and capacity for both cultural and economic development.Central to this remarkable capacity for development, these essays argue, lies the influence of the great twelfth-century thinker Chu Hsi. He has been considered responsible for providing much of the intellectual mortar that preserved the established order for centuries. However, when viewed in their historical setting, many of Chu's views can be seen as liberal—indeed, progressive.This is the first comprehensive study of Chu as an educator and of the propagation of his teachings throughout East Asia. Covering a wide spectrum of intellectual and social developments, the contributors address the ways in which Neo-Confucian thought and ethics were adapted to changes in Chinese society that anticipate many features and problems of modern society today.

People Will Not Forget


Hong Kong Journalists Association - 1989
    This book was published in 1989, and this is the new updated edition for June 4th 20th anniversary.

Daily Life in the Forbidden City


Yi Wan - 1989
    Full-color illustrations.