This is the first book in English to examine the fu, one of China’s oldest and culturally central literary forms, from its origins up to the late imperial era. Fu poems are highly revealing sources for understanding the culture, society, and politics of their periods, and in this volume eleven essays by prominent scholars treat the fu from four major perspectives: its original use in court recitation; as a poetic genre with distinctive formal features; as a vehicle of philosophical inquiry; and as a major mode of political expression.

This is the most comprehensive introduction in English to Sinelogical methods and traditional Chinese historical writing. The time span ranges from earliest times to 1911, with special emphasis on the years between the third century B.C. and the eighteenth century. The author includes introductions to major reference works and biographical information, and explanations of such matters as converting traditional dates. In addition to standard histories, the survey covers biographical writing, historical and administrative geography, works on statecraft, archival sources, and Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist writings.

This is a history of China for the 900-year time span of the late imperial period. A senior scholar of this epoch, F. W. Mote highlights the personal characteristics of the rulers and dynasties and probes the cultural theme of Chinese adaptations to recurrent alien rule. No other work provides a similar synthesis: generational events, personalities, and the spirit of the age combine to yield a comprehensive history of the civilization, not isolated but shaped by its relation to outsiders.

This vast panorama of the civilization of the largest society in human history reveals much about Chinese high and low culture, and the influential role of Confucian philosophical and social ideals. Throughout the Liao Empire, the world of the Song, the Mongol rule, and the early Qing through the Kangxi and Qianlong reigns, culture, ideas, and personalities are richly woven into the fabric of the political order and institutions. This is a monumental work that will stand among the classic accounts of the nature and vibrancy of Chinese civilization before the modern period.

Imperial China cannot be understood without an examination of its fiscal base. In his pioneering study, Yeh-chien Wang for the first time provides a reliable estimate and an in-depth analysis of China’s principal source of public revenue—the land tax—in the Ch’ing period. The purpose of this study is to inquire how the land-tax system worked and how much revenue was produced from this source. Hence the approach adopted by the author is both institutional and quantitative.

This volume explores the relationship between culture and the military in Chinese society from early China to the Qing empire, with contributions by eminent scholars aiming to reexamine the relationship between military matters and law, government, historiography, art, philosophy, literature, and politics.

The book critically investigates the perception that, due to the influence of Confucianism, Chinese culture has systematically devalued military matters. There was nothing inherently pacifist about the Chinese governments’ views of war, and pragmatic approaches—even aggressive and expansionist projects—often prevailed.

Though it has changed in form, a military elite has existed in China from the beginning of its history, and military service included a large proportion of the population at any given time. Popular literature praised the martial ethos of fighting men. Civil officials attended constantly to military matters on the administrative and financial ends. The seven military classics produced in antiquity continued to be read even into the modern period.

These original essays explore the ways in which intellectual, civilian, and literary elements helped shape the nature of military institutions, theory, and the culture of war. This important contribution bridges two literatures, military and cultural, that seldom appear together in the study of China, and deepens our understanding of war and society in Chinese history.

One of the most exciting recent developments in the study of Chinese literature has been the rediscovery of an extremely rich and diverse tradition of women's writing of the imperial period (221 BCE-1911 CE). Many of these writings are of considerable literary quality. Others provide us with moving insights into the lives and feelings of a surprisingly diverse group of women living in Confucian China, a society that perhaps more than any other is known for its patriarchal tradition.

Because of the burgeoning interest in the study of both premodern and modern women in China, several scholarly books, articles, and even anthologies of women's poetry have been published in the last two decades. This anthology differs from previous works by offering a glimpse of women's writings not only in poetry but in other genres as well, including essays and letters, drama, religious writing, and narrative fiction.

The authors have presented the selections within their respective biographical and historical contexts. This comprehensive approach helps to clarify traditional Chinese ideas on the nature and function of literature as well as on the role of the woman writer.

Since the second century BC the Confucian Classics, endorsed by the successive ruling houses of imperial China, had stood in tension with the statist ideals of “big government.” In Northern Song China (960–1127), a group of reform-minded statesmen and thinkers sought to remove the tension between the two by revisiting the highly controversial classic, the Rituals of Zhou: the administrative blueprint of an archaic bureaucratic state with the six ministries of some 370 offices staffed by close to 94,000 men. With their revisionist approaches, they reinvented it as the constitution of state activism. Most importantly, the reform-councilor Wang Anshi’s (1021–1086) new commentary on the Rituals of Zhou rose to preeminence during the New Policies period (ca. 1068–1125), only to be swept into the dustbin of history afterward. By reconstructing his revisionist exegesis from its partial remains, this book illuminates the interplay between classics, thinkers, and government in statist reform, and explains why the uneasy marriage between classics and state activism had to fail in imperial China.