by
Ebrey, Patricia Buckley, 1947- author.
Call Number
951.024092
Publication Date
2014
Summary
Main Description:China was the most advanced country in the world when Huizong ascended the throne in 1100 CE. In his eventful twenty-six year reign, the artistically-gifted emperor guided the Song Dynasty toward cultural greatness. Yet Huizong would be known to posterity as a political failure who lost the throne to Jurchen invaders and died their prisoner. The first comprehensive English-language biography of this important monarch, Emperor Huizong is a nuanced portrait that corrects the prevailing view of Huizong as decadent and negligent. Patricia Ebrey recasts him as a ruler genuinely ambitious--if too much so--in pursuing glory for his flourishing realm. After a rocky start trying to overcome political animosities at court, Huizong turned his attention to the good he could do. He greatly expanded the court's charitable ventures, founding schools, hospitals, orphanages, and paupers' cemeteries. An accomplished artist, he surrounded himself with outstanding poets, painters, and musicians and built palaces, temples, and gardens of unsurpassed splendor. What is often overlooked, Ebrey points out, is the importance of religious Daoism in Huizong's understanding of his role. He treated Daoist spiritual masters with great deference, wrote scriptural commentaries, and urged his subjects to adopt his beliefs and practices. This devotion to the Daoist vision of sacred kingship eventually alienated the Confucian mainstream and compromised his ability to govern. Readers will welcome this lively biography, which adds new dimensions to our understanding of a passionate and paradoxical ruler who, so many centuries later, continues to inspire both admiration and disapproval.
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0.0590
by
Zhou, Yiliang, 1913-2001.
Call Number
951.05092 23
Publication Date
2014
Format:
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0.0535
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by
Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N.
Call Number
951.06 23
Publication Date
2013
Summary
The need to understand China has never been more pressing. Within one generation, the global giant has transformed from an impoverished, repressive state into an economic and political powerhouse; yet conflicting impressions of the country and its leaders abound. In the fully revised and updated second edition of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, China expert Jeffrey Wasserstrom provides cogent answers to the most urgent questions regarding the superpower, and offers a framework for understanding its meteoric rise. Focusing his answers through the historical legacies ...
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0.0516
by
Woo, X. L.
Call Number
951.13205092
Publication Date
2013
Summary
Life in Shanghai played out against a backdrop of shifting political maneuvers until World War II burned off the patina that had made 'Old Shanghai' a world unto itself. In this personal history we follow one man through Japan's conquest of Shanghai in 1937 to the Chinese civil war and Communist takeover, Mao's desperate attempts to modernize a medieval country and Deng Xiaoping's opening the economy but not social freedoms. The protagonist lees burgeoning corruption and makes it to the United States to see for himself what the tales of freedom and democracy might offer.
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0.0408
by
Cochran, Sherman, 1940-
Call Number
338.092251132 23
Publication Date
2013
Format:
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0.0577
by
Evans, Brian L., 1932- author.
Call Number
327.710092 23
Publication Date
2013
Summary
A biography of Chester Ronning, Canadian politician and educator who promoted post-World War II diplomacy in Canada. This is an account of Ronning's life journey based on writtings, historical documents and many interviews with Ronning and others who knew him well both personally and professionally.
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0.0426
by
Shepley, Nick.
Call Number
950.42 22
Publication Date
2013
Summary
In the second half of the 19th Century, Japan awoke from centuries of isolation to be a surprising and warlike challenge to European power in Asia. This ebook charts the rise of Japan's power and her dominion over China. It also explores how Japan came to challenge European nations convinced of their own invincibility in the east, culminating in the attack on the USA at Pearl Harbour.
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0.0555
by
Zhang, Daye, 1854- author.
Call Number
951.034092 23
Publication Date
2013
Summary
""From the cry of a tiny insect, one can hear the sound of a vast world. "So begins Zhang Daye's preface to The World of a Tiny Insect, his haunting memoir of war and its aftermath. In 1861, when China's devastating Taiping rebellion began, Zhang was seven years old. The Taiping rebel army occupied Shaoxing, his hometown, and for the next two years, he hid from Taiping soldiers, local bandits, and imperial troops and witnessed gruesome scenes of violence and death. He lost friends and family and nearly died himself from starvation, illness, and encounters with soldiers on rampages. Written thirty years later, The World of a Tiny Insect gives voice to this history. A rare premodern Chinese literary work depicting a child's perspective, Zhang's sophisticated text captures the macabre images, paranoia, and emotional excess that defined his wartime experience and echoed throughout his adult life. The structure, content, and imagery of The World of a Tiny Insect reveals a carefully crafted, fragmented narrative that skips in time and probes the relationships between trauma and memory, revealing both history and its psychic impact. Xiaofei Tian's annotated translation includes an introduction that situates The World of a Tiny Insect in Chinese history and literature and explores the relevance of the book to the workings of traumatic memory. Zhang Daye (b. 1854) is known only as the author of The World of a Tiny Insect. Xiaofei Tian is professor of Chinese literature at Harvard University. Among her recent publications is Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China."The author and narrator recounts his terrible experiences and miraculous survivals with a child's curiosity and in a vivid, straightforward way. But he also embeds what happened to him in a larger historical, philosophical, moral, and aesthetic context. No comparable primary source available in English does anything like this for the Taiping Rebellion."--Judith Zeitlin, University of Chicago"--
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0.0408
by
Tsuji, Masanobu, 1902-
Call Number
940.54152092
Publication Date
2012
Summary
First published in translation from the Japanese in 1952, and long out of print, Colonel Tsuji's account of his escape into Thailand from the Japanese surrender in Bangkok in 1945, and then finding his way into China before returning to Japan in 1948, is a remarkable story, which has its place in the military history of the period.
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0.0408
by
Lary, Diana.
Call Number
304.80951 23
Publication Date
2012
Summary
"This succinct, readable introduction to Chinese migration traces the huge population movements both within China and beyond its borders over thousands of years. Distinguished historian Diana Lary explores these migrations and the key roles they have played in Chinese history. She sees migration as a broad spectrum of movement, from short-term and short-range to permanent and long-range, and as a powerful vehicle for the transfer of commodities, culture, religion, and political influence. Her book will be compelling for all readers who want to understand the context for the present internal and international migrations that have changed the face of China itself and its international relations."--Provided by publisher.
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0.0426
by
Hayter-Menzies, Grant, 1964- author.
Call Number
951.03 23
Publication Date
2011
Summary
In winter 1902, in the ruins of post-Boxer Uprising Beijing, two women from two different worlds joined hands in friendship-the former concubine and legendary tyrant Empress Dowager Cixi, and the Midwest-born, devoutly Christian diplomat's wife Sarah Pike Conger. Together, they made history.
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Electronic Resources
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0.0485
by
Stewart, Roderick, 1934-
Call Number
617.092 22
Publication Date
2011
Summary
The life and loves of Norman Bethune - Canadian doctor and activist and battlefield surgeon in China during the Japanese invasion of the 1930s.
Format:
Electronic Resources
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0.0535
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