Monumenta Serica-Journal of Oriental Studies最新文献

{"title":"Zhang Dewei, Thriving in Crisis: Buddhism and Political Disruption in China, 1522–1620. The Sheng Yen Series in Chinese Buddhist Studies. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. xxiii, 340 pp. Illustrations, Tables, Bibliography, Index. US$ 65 (HB). ISBN 978-0-231-19700-7","authors":"G. Scott","doi":"10.1080/02549948.2022.2061179","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02549948.2022.2061179","url":null,"abstract":"very little effort, i.e., that his profit will greatly surpass his investment. It would be interesting to know whether the petitions were successful or not. The question is raised several times in the study. But since there exist only the letters of the senders whereas the answers of the recipients are mostly missing, this question has to be left open for further studies. Jonas Polfuß undertakes excursions into other fields, like the postal service or income of officials during the Tang dynasty. He also makes suggestions for further research in the field of comparative studies. In this context the author stresses his belief that the “Tang Letter Network” analyzed in this study is not something “typically Chinese.” This is convincing, since the letters reflect basic human emotions like ambition and defeat, pride and despair, which are common all over the world. Maybe some parts of the study dwell too long on well-known facts, a few explanations are a bit repetitive, and sometimes less would be more. Yet the original approach and the mass of material collected and commented on is impressive and fascinating. About sixty examples of letter excerpts are presented – always in the Chinese original and with a German translation. The book, beautifully set and edited by the Ostasien Verlag, makes interesting and enjoyable reading. It appeals to a wide reading public, comprising not only specialists. Even general readers could profit from clever advice how to cultivate your network, how to deal with difficult superiors or how to apply for a job.","PeriodicalId":41653,"journal":{"name":"Monumenta Serica-Journal of Oriental Studies","volume":"44 1","pages":"260 - 262"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91240015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Politics and Calligraphy at the Courts of the Early and Middle Tang Dynasty","authors":"Xie Chen","doi":"10.1080/02549948.2022.2061163","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02549948.2022.2061163","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the Tang calligraphic collection from a socio-political perspective. Issues of the monumentality of Wang Xizhi’s calligraphy, the materiality of calligraphic works in the Inner Storehouse, the vicissitudes and accessibility of the imperial calligraphic collection are addressed here. This study demonstrates that the political implication of the imperial calligraphic collection is not only seen in the patronage of specific calligraphic works that expounded political messages, but also in the details of the management and uses of the calligraphic collection. The Tang rulers made innovative uses of calligraphy to cultivate their public image and strengthen their bonds with officials who were simultaneously audience, advisors, competitors and members of the same community of interests with the rulers. During the Tang dynasty, imperial collecting of calligraphy and the collection were adopted as a sign of cultured rule, a common aesthetic pursuit among the cultural elites, and a platform for power exchange and social interaction between the Tang rulers and ministers.","PeriodicalId":41653,"journal":{"name":"Monumenta Serica-Journal of Oriental Studies","volume":"14 1","pages":"99 - 130"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82513613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Rina Marie Camus, Archery Metaphor and Ritual in Early Confucian Texts. Lanham – Boulder – New York – London: Lexington Books, 2020. xii, 109 pp. Illustrations, Bibliography, Index. US$ 90 (HB). ISBN 978-1-4985-9720-3","authors":"L. Zádrapa","doi":"10.1080/02549948.2022.2061175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02549948.2022.2061175","url":null,"abstract":"give up when being confronted with the complete version. It is to be hoped that the Zuozhuan Reader will whet the appetite of future students to explore the full world of the Zuozhuan when having read the starters presented here. Unlike the case of the Shiji, nobody has so far suggested that there is a common thread running through the Zuozhuan. As has been stated above, this work is simply very difficult to understand. Maybe the publication of the Reader-version will present a good starting-point for a new generation of scholars who will try to unravel the enigma of the Zuozhuan itself and to take scholarship concerning this first narrative history of ancient China to a level unreached so far.","PeriodicalId":41653,"journal":{"name":"Monumenta Serica-Journal of Oriental Studies","volume":"22 1","pages":"249 - 251"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81463929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Richard J. Smith, The Qing Dynasty and Traditional Chinese Culture. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. xii, 612 pp. Appendices, Bibliography, Index. US$ 112 (HB). ISBN 978-1-4422-2192-5","authors":"A. Goldman","doi":"10.1080/02549948.2022.2061503","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02549948.2022.2061503","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41653,"journal":{"name":"Monumenta Serica-Journal of Oriental Studies","volume":"42 1","pages":"266 - 268"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78761803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"David E. Mungello, This Suffering Is My Joy: The Underground Church in Eighteenth-Century China. Lanham – Boulder – New York – London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021. xii, 6, 174 pp. Map, Figures, Bibliography Index. US$ 85 (HB). ISBN 978-1-5381-5029-0","authors":"Gianni Criveller","doi":"10.1080/02549948.2022.2061511","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02549948.2022.2061511","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41653,"journal":{"name":"Monumenta Serica-Journal of Oriental Studies","volume":"17 1","pages":"270 - 272"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73786568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On the Civil Transformation of the Southern Tang (937–976)","authors":"Ng Pak-sheung","doi":"10.1080/02549948.2022.2061170","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02549948.2022.2061170","url":null,"abstract":"This article aims to elaborate on the efforts made by Xu Zhigao and his descendants to implement a new practice that recruited local literati to positions of power as well as the extent to which the practice helped facilitate civil transformation and civil administration for their regime. One important way to achieve civil transformation was to bureaucratize the local administration, which involved staffing the mechanism with civil officials. After succeeding in the civil service examinations, local literati of humble origin could take advantage of this possibility for prosperity and honor their families by means of becoming part of the bureaucracy. However, the life span of the Southern Tang was limited to only thirty-nine years. Except for the relatively low number of those who successfully passed the civil service examinations, most of the meritorious officials and official families still considered relying on the protection privilege to be the ideal way to launch the bureaucratic careers of their descendants. Therefore, although the civil service examinations may have exerted some positive impact on civil transformation and civil administration, the advantages did not last long enough to thoroughly change the administrative feature of the Southern Tang.","PeriodicalId":41653,"journal":{"name":"Monumenta Serica-Journal of Oriental Studies","volume":"164 1","pages":"131 - 163"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77275031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Cultural History of “Redness” in Chinese Civilisation","authors":"Wu Wei","doi":"10.1080/02549948.2022.2061161","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02549948.2022.2061161","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the cultural history of the colour red in pre-imperial China by investigating the interrelationship between the materiality of the colour environment and the symbolism of colour language. Linguistically, it studies the two major words for “red” – the old Chinese label chi and the modern Chinese label hong – found in representative texts datable before 221 BCE. Archeologically, it addresses the range of use and ritual implications of different red hues in artefacts unearthed in Neolithic cultures in both northern and southern China as well as in the Bronze Age Shang and Zhou dynasties. Juxtaposing textual with material sources, it shows that pure red in saturation served as a symbol for high status and immortality, and fuelled by its cosmic and gender associations, the character denoting saturated red in ancient Chinese chi became a cardinal colour due to its ceremonial significance rather than its rarity.","PeriodicalId":41653,"journal":{"name":"Monumenta Serica-Journal of Oriental Studies","volume":"38 1","pages":"1 - 31"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82891720","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Martin Gimm, Der Fall Prinz Rong im Prozeß gegen den Jesuitenpater Adam Schall in den Jahren 1664/65 in China. Sinologica Coloniensia, 36. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2018. 126 S. Abbildungen, Quellen- und Literaturverzeichnis, Index. € 38 (HB). ISBN 978-3-447-10985-7","authors":"A. Siegl","doi":"10.1080/02549948.2022.2061509","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02549948.2022.2061509","url":null,"abstract":"histories in favor of defining that elusive and unifying – if now unnamed – “Chineseness.” In the next layer up, we encounter, among other thorny interpretive questions, Smith’s embrace of China anthropologist James Watson’s notion of orthopraxy from circa 1985 (and still much debated in the subfield of Chinese religion), which was grounded in the structural anthropology of the 1980s. Juxtaposed to that on the topmost layer is Smith’s newer definition of culture as varied and dynamic, if constrained by past patterns and precedent. And thus, debates in the field dating back to the mid-1980s nestle alongside the newest research, including Smith’s own on encyclopedias for daily use (riyong leishu), as well as synopses of the work of many others, generating at times a mild cognitive dissonance. The most jarring “fossil” from this evolving survey of the Qing, though, is Smith’s invocation of traditional China in contrast to the modern, which intriguingly was not part of the title in the first two editions, even though the rubric of the tradition/modern dichotomy was. To be sure, the field has not come to consensus on a suitable alternative to “traditional” China. Some historians use late imperial China, others early modern; and Smith’s insights on the continuing traces of Qing (and Chinese) rhetoric and practice in the modern era are well taken. That label of traditional, however, still has the tendency to render static everything before China’s encounter with the West. At the very least, a more robust discussion of his choice to use such a fraught label in the China context, as well as the scholarship on the ways in which the concept of tradition is invented in tandem with the advent of the modern, might have been warranted. Smith’s Qing Dynasty and Traditional Chinese Culture nevertheless represents an incredible repository of knowledge about Qing China. He has woven together for the field multiple generations of history and scholarship. The encyclopedic scope (and readability) of the volume makes it an eminently valuable sourcebook for specialists and general audiences; I imagine it might be especially useful to the new assistant professor first preparing lectures for a survey course.","PeriodicalId":41653,"journal":{"name":"Monumenta Serica-Journal of Oriental Studies","volume":"6 1","pages":"268 - 269"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85906514","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Li Hsiao-t’i, Opera, Society, and Politics in Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2019. x, 376 pp. 20 Photos, 6 Maps, 1 Table, Glossary, Bibliography, Index. US$ 49.95 (HB). ISBN 978-0-674-98716-6","authors":"Andrea Riemenschnitter","doi":"10.1080/02549948.2022.2061519","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02549948.2022.2061519","url":null,"abstract":"critique of capitalist modernity, Weigelin-Schwiedrzik reminds us that there are opposing voices against both the deterministic, teleological progress and prospect optimism. More importantly, these discordant voices on the margins show that the discourse of progress is never absolute in China. There are cracks, gaps, or even safe havens, where sensitive souls are able to find ways to express their views. Being so, Weigelin-Schwiedrzik argues that a seldom discussed text of Lu Xun, “Modern History,” reveals to us the possibility of resistance in a dark moment of humanity. As a reader, I did not follow the sequence of chapters when reading the edited volume. But as I read the volume in a way that I felt comfortable, I found it speaking as much about the past as about the present. To me, Weigelin-Schwiedrzik’s concluding remark is inspirational. “The consensus of living in a world of makebelieve,” she writes, “is as strong an impediment to creating something new as the reality of repetitiousness” (p. 312). In one sentence, she calls attention to the danger of our times, especially the danger of creating a world of make-believe with big data, social media, and global financialization. At the same time, her warning is also a source of hope. In a time of global crises (such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the new division of transnational networks), we must look forward to a different and better future that will not repeat our past mistakes.","PeriodicalId":41653,"journal":{"name":"Monumenta Serica-Journal of Oriental Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"282 - 287"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88154716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Commentarial Strategies of “Jie Lao” (Explaining the Laozi)","authors":"B. Hendrischke","doi":"10.1080/02549948.2022.2061168","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02549948.2022.2061168","url":null,"abstract":"“Jie Lao” (Explaining the Laozi) is a chapter of the Hanfeizi and an early example of the genre of philosophical commentary. The commentator explains and analyses the Laozi’s propositions and simultaneously, on their basis, develops another set of teachings. He activates the term pattern (li) to design ways for putting the Laozi’s Dao to practical use. The article documents the contrast between both commentarial strategies. It thereby throws some light on an early stage of China’s long tradition of commentarial writings.","PeriodicalId":41653,"journal":{"name":"Monumenta Serica-Journal of Oriental Studies","volume":"12 1","pages":"71 - 98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85326008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}