War in the Making of Modern China

1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 737-756 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans J. Van De Ven
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Major Powers ◽  
The Past ◽  
Opium War ◽  
Taiping Rebellion ◽  
War Of Resistance

No one even with only a casual interest in Chinese history can be unaware that China's capacity for war in the last few centuries has proved truly awesome. In the middle of the eighteenth century Qing armies numbering some 150,000 troops marched into central Asia. After many campaigns some of which continued for nearly two years, they rid China finally of the menace from the desert that had caused so much havoc in the past. In the process they exterminated the Zunghars as a people. In the nineteenth century, China fought wars with nearly all the major powers: England in the Opium War of 1839–42 and several times thereafter; France in the 1880s; and Japan in the 1890s. In 1900 it took on all of them at the same time. Civil war too was a frequent occurrence. The Taiping Rebellion of 1852–64 exacted casualties that should be counted in the tens of millions, and this was merely the most devastating of a series of rebellions. The scale of war in the twentieth century has proved even more spectacular. Warlord wars, fighting between the nationalists and communists, and the War of Resistance against Japan ravaged China until the communist victory in 1949.

Historical Fragments’ Mobile Echo

Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Bell ◽  
Kathy Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
The Third ◽  
Opium War ◽  
The Subject

Translocation – Transformation is an ambitious contribution to the subject of mobility. Materially, it interlinks seemingly disparate objects into a surprisingly unified exhibition on mobile histories and heritages: twelve bronze zodiac heads, silk and bamboo creatures, worn life vests, pressed Pu-erh tea, thousands of broken antique teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China, the Second Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and today’s global refugee crisis.

The Qing Empire's Last Flowering: The expansion of China's Post Office at the turn of the twentieth century

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 895-930
Author(s):  
WEIPIN TSAI
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
General Public ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Postal Service ◽  
Post Office ◽  
Railway Network ◽  
Opium War ◽  
Great Rivers ◽  
History Of ◽  
Set Up

AbstractThe Great Qing Imperial Post Office was set up in 1896, soon after the First Sino-Japanese War. It provided the first national postal service for the general public in the whole of Chinese history, and was a symbol of China's increasing engagement with the rest of the globe. Much of the preparation for the launch was carried out by the high-ranking foreign staff of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, an influential institution established after the first Opium War.With a mission to promote modernization and project Qing power, the Imperial Post Office was established with a centrally controlled set of unified methods and procedures, and its success was rooted in integration with the new railway network, a strategy at the heart of its ambitious plans for expansion. This article explores the history of this postal expansion through railways, the use of which allowed its creators to plan networks in an integrated way—from urban centres on the coasts and great rivers through to China's interior.

Commemorating War in Eighteenth-Century China

1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 869-899 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Waley-Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Qing Dynasty ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
The Past ◽  
Qianlong Emperor

Reviewing his long reign in 1792, the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736–1795) hailed his military triumphs as one of its central accomplishments. To underscore the importance he ascribed to these successes, he began to style himself ‘Old Man of the Ten Complete Victories’ (Shi Quan Lao Ren), after an essay in which he boldly declared he had surpassed, in ‘Ten Complete Military Victories’ (Shi Quan Wu Gong), the far-reaching westward expansions of the great Han (206 BCE–220 CE) and Tang (618–907) empires. Such an assertion, together with the program of commemoration discussed below, served to justify the immense expense incurred by frequent long-distance campaigning; to elevate all these wars to an unimpeachable level of splendor even though some were distinctly less glorious than others; and to align the Manchu Qing dynasty (16–191 i) with two of the greatest native dynasties of Chinese history and the Qianlong Emperor personally with some of the great figures of the past.

What Was Neo-Classicism?

1969 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-70
Author(s):  
James William Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Matthew Arnold ◽  
Eighteenth Century Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
Vast Range ◽  
Century Literature ◽  
Selection Of

There seems to be no doubt about it: the century-old truisms about the literature variously called “Augustan” and “Neo-Classical” are in the process of dissolution. Premises induced by J. S. Mill and Matthew Arnold, explored by Oliver Elton, dogmatized by G. E. B. Saintsbury, and summarized by Leslie Stephen now appear inadequate to more recent scholars, whose research and rereading of Neo-Classical texts run counter to the general testimony as well as the specific judgments of their grandfathers. For the past few decades at least, published commentary has increasingly indicated the need to overhaul received ideas about those writers identified with the revival of classicism in England following the Restoration of Charles II and continuing throughout the eighteenth century.The deficiencies in Victorian and Edwardian assumptions about Neo-Classicism revealed by latter-day findings are several, some of them due to false criteria of taste, morality, and literary excellence. But chiefly the research of the present age has disclosed a vast range of literature simply ignored — or, perhaps, suppressed — by earlier critics. Based as they were on a limited, prejudged selection of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, the premises inherited from Victorian criticism have naturally failed to account for the discoveries of twentieth-century scholars.The resulting disparity between limited assumptions and expanded information has called into question the very possibility of formulating any critical schema that accurately describes the characteristics of English literature between 1660 and 1800. The relativistic — not to say atomistic — inclinations of contemporary scholarship enforce the view that indeed no schema is possible.

Material Visions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stacy C. Kozakavich
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Temporal Changes ◽  
Intentional Communities ◽  
The Past ◽  
Building Community ◽  
Vinyl Records

Artifacts made, bought, and used within past intentional communities demand careful interpretation. They may reaffirm or challenge our long-held ideas about a group, and as mute witnesses to the past can invite conflicting views among scholars and community descendants. This chapter spans the volume's widest temporal range, from eighteenth-century ceramics and food remains left by Pennsylvania's Ephrata Cloister to twentieth-century vinyl records listened to by members of California's Chosen Family. Examples from the Shakers, Harmonists, and Moravians demonstrate the importance of building community-specific contexts of interpretation that are sensitive to differences between individual groups as well as temporal changes within long-lived communities.

China and “Modernity”: the Uses of the Study of Chinese History in the Past and the Present

1997 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 461-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harriet Zurndorfer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Data ◽  
Central Focus ◽  
The Past

AbstractThe central focus of this paper is the lack of impact Euro-centric theories of development have made on twentieth century historical writing by leading Chinese and Japanese scholars. The author reviews publications by three important historians, Naitō Konan, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, and Yü Ying-shih, all of whom attempt to locate China's first experience with “modernity” prior to nineteenth or twentieth century encounters with the West. Although all three historians differ in their interpretation of the concept “modernity,” they find Chinese culture a central feature in the identification of this concept. Furthermore, all three writers rely upon historical evidence, in particular economic and social data, to counter claims of China's history as a process of linear development.

The Riddle of Me’iri’s Recent Popularity

2020 ◽  
pp. 394-401
Author(s):  
Haym Soloveitchik
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Past

This chapter examines the recent popularity of R. Menaḥem ha Me'iri of Perpignan. It is commonly thought that the works of R. Menaḥem ha Me'iri were first published in the twentieth century. This is correct if one is referring to the series of Me'iri publications that Avraham Sofer produced from the huge, six-volume manuscript in the Parma Palatina Library, and which contains the Bet ha-Beḥirah on most of the tractates of the Talmud. However, a glance at any bibliography will immediately reveal that the Bet ha-Beḥirah on many tractates was already published in the eighteenth century. Some parts of it were printed in the eighteenth century, a few more in the nineteenth; but they were swiftly forgotten. In fact, the revival of his work did not begin in the 1930s: initially Sofer's publications had little impact. Only in the latter half of the twentieth century did they become popular, and various scholars moved quickly to put out the Bet ha-Beḥirah on other tractates of the Talmud and to publish new editions of the works that Sofer had already published, and these editions have been repeatedly reprinted. Why the centuries-long indifference and why the revival of the past sixty years? The chapter answers these questions.

Chinese Collection 457: the Call for Global History

2015 ◽  
Vol 91 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-44
Author(s):  
Zheng Yangwen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Global History ◽  
Opium War ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Qianlong Emperor

With the help of the Jesuits, the Qianlong emperor (often said to be Chinas Sun King in the long eighteenth century) built European palaces in the Garden of Perfect Brightness and commissioned a set of twenty images engraved on copper in Paris. The Second Anglo-Chinese Opium War in 1860 not only saw the destruction of the Garden, but also of the images, of which there are only a few left in the world. The John Rylands set contains a coloured image which raises even more questions about the construction of the palaces and the after-life of the images. How did it travel from Paris to Bejing, and from Belgium to the John Rylands Library? This article probes the fascinating history of this image. It highlights the importance of Europeans in the making of Chinese history and calls for studies of China in Europe.

scholarly journals The Journey towards “No Man's Land”: Interpreting the China-Korea Borderland within Imperial and Colonial Contexts

2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 1035-1058 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nianshen Song
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Geographic Information ◽  
Legal Knowledge ◽  
Tumen River ◽  
Origin And Evolution ◽  
The Past ◽  
Japanese Colonial ◽  
No Man's Land

In the early twentieth century, the sovereignty of a territory north of the China-Korea Tumen River border was under severe dispute between China, Korea, and Japan. Based on a Jesuit memoir and map of Korea published in eighteenth-century Europe, a Japanese colonial bureaucrat and international law expert, Shinoda Jisaku, asserted that a vast region north of the China-Korea border should be regarded as a “no man's land.” Employing Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and European materials, this article traces the origin and evolution of such a definition. It demonstrates that the Jesuit map and description were based on false geographic information, which the Korean court deliberately provided to a Manchu official in 1713 in order to safeguard its interests. During prolonged intercommunication between diverse areas of the globe during the past three centuries, spatial and legal knowledge has been produced, reproduced, and transformed within imperial and colonial contexts.

scholarly journals WINCKELMANN’S APOLLO AND THE PHYSIOGNOMY OF RACE

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (59) ◽  
pp. 6-35
Author(s):  
Lasse Hodne
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
White Male ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Male Body ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
Different Types

The taste for classical art that induced museums in the West to acquire masterpieces from ancient Greece and Rome for their collections was stimulated largely by the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann. In the past decade, a number of articles have claimed that Winckelmann’s glorification of marble statues representing the white, male body promotes notions of white supremacy. The present article challenges this view by examining theories prevalent in the eighteenth century (especially climate theory) that affected Winckelmann’s views on race. Through an examination of different types of classicism, the article also seeks to demonstrate that Winckelmann’s aesthetics were opposed to the eclectic use of ancient models typical of the fascist regimes of the twentieth century.

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