The Early Chinese Empires - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Early Chinese Empires write by Mark Edward Lewis. This book was released on 2010-10-30. The Early Chinese Empires available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. In 221 bc the First Emperor of Qin unified the lands that would become the heart of a Chinese empire. Though forged by conquest, this vast domain depended for its political survival on a fundamental reshaping of Chinese culture. With this informative book, we are present at the creation of an ancient imperial order whose major features would endure for two millennia. The Qin and Han constitute the "classical period" of Chinese history--a role played by the Greeks and Romans in the West. Mark Edward Lewis highlights the key challenges faced by the court officials and scholars who set about governing an empire of such scale and diversity of peoples. He traces the drastic measures taken to transcend, without eliminating, these regional differences: the invention of the emperor as the divine embodiment of the state; the establishment of a common script for communication and a state-sponsored canon for the propagation of Confucian ideals; the flourishing of the great families, whose domination of local society rested on wealth, landholding, and elaborate kinship structures; the demilitarization of the interior; and the impact of non-Chinese warrior-nomads in setting the boundaries of an emerging Chinese identity. The first of a six-volume series on the history of imperial China, The Early Chinese Empires illuminates many formative events in China's long history of imperialism--events whose residual influence can still be discerned today.
China Between Empires
China Between Empires - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook China Between Empires write by Mark Edward Lewis. This book was released on 2011-04-30. China Between Empires available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. After the collapse of the Han dynasty in the third century CE, China divided along a north-south line. Mark Lewis traces the changes that both underlay and resulted from this split in a period that saw the geographic redefinition of China, more engagement with the outside world, significant changes to family life, developments in the literary and social arenas, and the introduction of new religions. The Yangzi River valley arose as the rice-producing center of the country. Literature moved beyond the court and capital to depict local culture, and newly emerging social spaces included the garden, temple, salon, and country villa. The growth of self-defined genteel families expanded the notion of the elite, moving it away from the traditional great Han families identified mostly by material wealth. Trailing the rebel movements that toppled the Han, the new faiths of Daoism and Buddhism altered every aspect of life, including the state, kinship structures, and the economy. By the time China was reunited by the Sui dynasty in 589 ce, the elite had been drawn into the state order, and imperial power had assumed a more transcendent nature. The Chinese were incorporated into a new world system in which they exchanged goods and ideas with states that shared a common Buddhist religion. The centuries between the Han and the Tang thus had a profound and permanent impact on the Chinese world.
Rumor in Early Chinese Empires
Rumor in Early Chinese Empires - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Rumor in Early Chinese Empires write by Zongli Lu. This book was released on 2021-03-11. Rumor in Early Chinese Empires available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. A major historical study of the formation, spread and impact of rumor in the early Chinese empires.
China’s Cosmopolitan Empire
China’s Cosmopolitan Empire - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook China’s Cosmopolitan Empire write by Mark Edward Lewis. This book was released on 2009-06-30. China’s Cosmopolitan Empire available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The Tang dynasty is often called China’s “golden age,” a period of commercial, religious, and cultural connections from Korea and Japan to the Persian Gulf, and a time of unsurpassed literary creativity. Mark Lewis captures a dynamic era in which the empire reached its greatest geographical extent under Chinese rule, painting and ceramic arts flourished, women played a major role both as rulers and in the economy, and China produced its finest lyric poets in Wang Wei, Li Bo, and Du Fu. The Chinese engaged in extensive trade on sea and land. Merchants from Inner Asia settled in the capital, while Chinese entrepreneurs set off for the wider world, the beginning of a global diaspora. The emergence of an economically and culturally dominant south that was controlled from a northern capital set a pattern for the rest of Chinese imperial history. Poems celebrated the glories of the capital, meditated on individual loneliness in its midst, and described heroic young men and beautiful women who filled city streets and bars. Despite the romantic aura attached to the Tang, it was not a time of unending peace. In 756, General An Lushan led a revolt that shook the country to its core, weakening the government to such a degree that by the early tenth century, regional warlordism gripped many areas, heralding the decline of the Great Tang.
Early China
Early China - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Early China write by Li Feng. This book was released on 2013-12-30. Early China available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. A critical new interpretation of the early history of Chinese civilization based on the most recent scholarship and archaeological discoveries.
