and converted to ebook format. When their husbands were killed by the Song army, two pregnant women found safe haven in foreign lands. Li Ping gave birth to Guo Jing, a sturdy but blockheaded young man who roamed the Mongolian prairie with the family of Temujin. Bao Xi Ruo gave birth to Yang Kang, a smart and crafty young man who became the son of Wanyan Hong Lie, a successor of the Jin empire. When a pact between their martial arts masters brought them together and the truth behind their fathers' deaths was revealed, one found martial arts enlightenment and a cause greater than his own while the other descended into darkness and destroyed everything and everyone around him.

    Two additional lessons use texts from later periods to help students appreciate the changes in written Chinese over the centuries.Each lesson consists of a text, a vocabulary list featuring discussions of meaning and usage, explanations of grammar, and explications of difficult passages. The standard modern Chinese, Japanese, and Korean pronunciations are indicated for each character, making this a learning tool for native speakers of those languages as well. Appendices give suggestions for further readings, review common and significant words, explain the radical system, and provide Japanese kanbun readings for all the selections. Glossaries of all vocabulary items and pronunciation indexes for modern Chinese and Korean are also included.

    Tales and Traditions was specifically created to help learners of Chinese achieve that goal, by collecting the most well-known works in the Chinese literary canon in a series of convenient supplementary readers.Perfect for pleasure reading outside of class, or class instruction, Tales and Traditions exposes students to a wealth of information essential for the development of cultural fluency in Chinese.This first volume for beginning learners contains fables and literary quotations, sayings and stories from classical philosophers, and myths and legends that are at the heart of Chinese traditional culture. This series of readings will be especially welcomed as the AP® Chinese Language and Culture exam requires knowledge of China's literary, cultural, and historical traditions.

    In Evoking Tang, a bilingual collection, Xiaolong offers English translations of more than 70 classic Chinese poems. The original texts represent the work of almost 40 poets from the Tang period, whose poems are comparable in importance, for English-speaking readers, to those of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Longfellow. The anthology is illustrated with 30 traditional Chinese paintings, which are included to aid interpretation and to stir the imagination of readers as they enter the poetic world.

    Even today the hypersexual female ghost continues to be a source of fascination in East Asian media, much like the sexually predatory vampire in American and European movies, TV, and novels. But while vampires can be of either gender, erotic Chinese ghosts are almost exclusively female. The significance of this gender asymmetry in Chinese literary history is the subject of Judith Zeitlin's elegantly written and meticulously researched new book.Zeitlin's study centers on the seventeenth century, one of the most interesting and creative periods of Chinese literature and politically one of the most traumatic, witnessing the overthrow of the Ming, the Manchu conquest, and the subsequent founding of the Qing. Drawing on fiction, drama, poetry, medical cases, and visual culture, the author departs from more traditional literary studies, which tend to focus on a single genre or author. Ranging widely across disciplines, she integrates detailed analyses of great literary works with insights drawn from the history of medicine, art history, comparative literature, anthropology, religion, and performance studies.The Phantom Heroine probes the complex literary and cultural roots of the Chinese ghost tradition. Zeitlin is the first to address its most remarkable feature: the phenomenon of verse attributed to phantom writers--that is, authors actually reputed to be spirits of the deceased. She also makes the case for the importance of lyric poetry in developing a ghostly aesthetics and image code. Most strikingly, Zeitlin shows that the representation of female ghosts, far from being a marginal preoccupation, expresses cultural concerns of central importance.