Opium in China

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yangwen Zheng
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Qing Dynasty ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Medicinal Herb ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Small Countries ◽  
The 19Th Century

Opium was used as a medicinal herb during the Tang-Song dynastic era, if not earlier, but this medicinal role was transformed during the Ming dynasty as it became an ingredient in aphrodisiacs produced for the Ming court. Small countries in South-Southeast Asia included opium in their tribute items to the Ming. Tribute missions were a form of trade as well as the best way to maintain foreign relations. Opium transformed again in the early Qing dynasty as Southeast Asian Chinese brought the habit of smoking opium mixed with tobacco back to the mainland. This was soon integrated in and promoted by the sex recreation industry in the mid-18th century, and the demand for opium grew rapidly in the early decades of the 19th century. By the 1850s, increasing supply fueled a level of consumption that neither repeated attempts at prohibition, nor two opium wars could stymie; it exploded into a consumer revolution. Opium became vital to the economy as all the polities since the late Qing taxed it to sustain themselves. It also became a symbol of China’s humiliation and anti-imperialist political platform. It has now come back to haunt the country despite the Mao era success in eradication.

Speculations on the Nature and Pattern of Opium Smoking

1979 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
John C. Kramer
Keyword(s):  
Drug Use ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Withdrawal Signs

Opium smoking began spreading slowly but steadily in China from early in the 18th Century. It grew through the 19th Century to the point that by the end of the century it became a nearly universal practice among males in some regions. While estimates vary, it appears that most smokers consumed six grams or less daily. Addicted smokers were occasionally found among those smoking as little as three grams daily, but more often addicted smokers reported use of about 12 grams a day or more. An individual smoking twelve grams of opium probably ingests about 80 mg. of morphine. Thirty mg. of morphine daily may induce some withdrawal signs, while 60 mg. daily are clearly addicting. While testimony varied widely, it appears likely that most opium smokers were not disabled by their practice. This appears to be the case today, too, among those peoples in southeast Asia who have continued to smoke opium. There appear to be social and perhaps psychophysiological forces which work toward limiting the liabilities of drug use.

Warfare in Premodern Southeast Asia

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael W. Charney
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Military Technology ◽  
Direct Role ◽  
Indigenous Literature ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Southeast Asians ◽  
The 19Th Century

Warfare in premodern Southeast Asia, roughly that fought up until the end of the 19th century, was shaped by the environment across the region. Maritime trade connections brought the introduction and circulation of external models of warfare that would help to frame the way warfare in the region was depicted in some of the indigenous literature and art (including the influence of the Indian epics on shadow puppet theater). Firearms played a more direct role in determining the development of warfare in the region over the course of the early modern period. As a result of better firearms, the elephant declined in battlefield importance and was increasingly replaced by cavalry. In the 18th century, Southeast Asians fielded some of their best-organized armies, and in the early 19th century there was a temporary revival of naval strength in parts of the region, particularly in Vietnam. Nevertheless, the introduction of the steamship and better European military technology from the 1820s ushered in the decline of the remaining Southeast Asian armies by the end of the 19th century. Although indigenous states would attempt to modernize and catch up with Europe militarily, all of Southeast Asia, save for Thailand, fell under European control.

Print Culture and the Circulation of Knowledge in Imperial China, 8th–17th Centuries

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucille Chia
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Qing Dynasty ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Song Dynasty ◽  
Great Part ◽  
Manuscript Culture ◽  
Imperial China ◽  
Woodblock Printing ◽  
The 19Th Century

Print culture in imperial China spans over twelve hundred years, from the late 7th century ce to the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. During this long period, mechanical reproduction of texts and image meant primarily woodblock printing (xylography), and, to a lesser extent, typography, using movable types made of wood, metal, and ceramics. Xylography was first used for religious purposes, such as prayer sheets and scriptures, but by the late 8th century, nonreligious imprints for daily use were produced. Only in the mid-10th century, however, did the state and the literati elite begin to produce and disseminate many nonreligious works in print. Thus, the dramatic growth in the number and diversity of imprints produced by government, private, religious, and commercial publishers took off in the Song Dynasty (960–1279), due in great part to the state’s efforts to compile and publish many works. One may argue, however, that not until the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) would print culture be sufficiently widespread to be in ascendance, as evidenced by the great variety of works, the evolving page designs, and the changing attitudes of readers toward imprints. By the mid Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), printing had spread throughout the country into remote regions and throughout all levels of society. Changes in publishing culture from the 19th century onward were spurred by the adoption of new print technologies from the West, such as lithography and movable-type letterpress, which allowed for faster publication of far greater press runs, even as the traditional printing technologies continued to be used. Finally, it is important to note that a thriving manuscript culture continued to coexist with print until at least the late 19th century. The parting of the ways between print and manuscript became lasting only with the dominance of modern print technologies in the 20th century.

Grammatical Descriptions in Manchu Grammar Books from the Qing Dynasty

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-55
Author(s):  
Takashi Takekoshi
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Qing Dynasty ◽  
The Qing Dynasty ◽  
Chinese Scholars ◽  
High Degree ◽  
The 19Th Century

In this paper, we analyse features of the grammatical descriptions in Manchu grammar books from the Qing Dynasty. Manchu grammar books exemplify how Chinese scholars gave Chinese names to grammatical concepts in Manchu such as case, conjugation, and derivation which exist in agglutinating languages but not in isolating languages. A thorough examination reveals that Chinese scholarly understanding of Manchu grammar at the time had attained a high degree of sophistication. We conclude that the reason they did not apply modern grammatical concepts until the end of the 19th century was not a lack of ability but because the object of their grammatical descriptions was Chinese, a typical isolating language.

Scholars discover local history: the case of northeast Lapland in the 18th century

Polar Record ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Lähteenmäki
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Economic Efficiency ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Local Information ◽  
Local History ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
The People ◽  
New Form ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Distant Region

ABSTRACTThe academic study of local and regional history in Sweden took on a quite new form and significance in the 18th century. Humiliating defeats in wars had brought the kingdom's period of greatness to an end and forced the crown to re-evaluate the country's position and image and reconsider the internal questions of economic efficiency and settlement. One aspect in this was more effective economic and political control over the peripheral parts of the realm, which meant that also the distant region of Kemi Lapland, bordering on Russia, became an object of systematic government interest. The practical local documentation of this area took the form of dissertations prepared by students native to the area under the supervision of well known professors, reports sent back by local ministers and newspaper articles. The people responsible for communicating this information may be said to have functioned as ‘mimic men’ in the terminology of H.K. Bhabha. This supervised gathering and publication of local information created the foundation for the nationalist ideology and interest in ordinary people and local cultures that emerged at the end of the century and flourished during the 19th century.

Origine et diffusion des expressions romanes du type jaune paille

2021 ◽  
Vol 133 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-27
Author(s):  
Sara Matrisciano ◽  
Franz Rainer
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Short Discussion ◽  
Colour Term ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
And Diffusion

All major Romance languages have patterns of the type jaune paille for expressing shades of colour represented by some prototypical object. The first constituent of this pattern is a colour term, while the second one designates a prototypical representative of the colour shade. The present paper starts with a short discussion of the controversial grammatical status of this pattern and its constituents. Its main aim, however, concerns the origin and diffusion of this pattern. We have not found hard and fast evidence that Medieval Italian pigment compounds of the type verderame influenced the rise of the jaune paille pattern, which first appears in French in the 16th century. This pattern continued to be a minority solution during the 17th century, but established itself during the 18th century. In the 19th century, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese adopted the pattern jaune paille, while it did not reach Catalan and Romanian before the 20th century.

Brazilian Colonial Art and the Decolonization of Art History

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Berbara
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Art History ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Minas Gerais ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Art Objects ◽  
Colonial Art ◽  
The One ◽  
The 19Th Century

There are at least two ways to think about the term “Brazilian colonial art.” It can refer, in general, to the art produced in the region presently known as Brazil between 1500, when navigator Pedro Álvares Cabral claimed the coastal territory for the Lusitanian crown, and the country’s independence in the early 19th century. It can also refer, more specifically, to the artistic manifestations produced in certain Brazilian regions—most notably Bahia, Minas Gerais, and Rio de Janeiro—over the 18th century and first decades of the 19th century. In other words, while denotatively it corresponds to the art produced in the period during which Brazil was a colony, it can also work as a metonym valid to indicate particular temporal and geographical arcs within this period. The reasons for its widespread metonymical use are related, on the one hand, to the survival of a relatively large number of art objects and buildings produced in these arcs, but also to a judicative value: at least since the 1920s, artists, historians, and cultivated Brazilians have tended to regard Brazilian colonial art—in its more specific meaning—as the greatest cultural product of those centuries. In this sense, Brazilian colonial art is often identified with the Baroque—to the extent that the terms “Brazilian Baroque,” “Brazilian colonial art,” and even “barroco mineiro” (i.e., Baroque produced in the province of Minas Gerais) may be used interchangeably by some scholars and, even more so, the general public. The study of Brazilian colonial art is currently intermingled with the question of what should be understood as Brazil in the early modern period. Just like some 20th- and 21st-century scholars have been questioning, for example, the term “Italian Renaissance”—given the fact that Italy, as a political entity, did not exist until the 19th century—so have researchers problematized the concept of a unified term to designate the whole artistic production of the territory that would later become the Federative Republic of Brazil between the 16th and 19th centuries. This territory, moreover, encompassed a myriad of very different societies and languages originating from at least three different continents. Should the production, for example, of Tupi or Yoruba artworks be considered colonial? Or should they, instead, be understood as belonging to a distinctive path and independent art historical process? Is it viable to propose a transcultural academic approach without, at the same time, flattening the specificities and richness of the various societies that inhabited the territory? Recent scholarly work has been bringing together traditional historiographical references in Brazilian colonial art and perspectives from so-called “global art history.” These efforts have not only internationalized the field, but also made it multidisciplinary by combining researches in anthropology, ethnography, archaeology, history, and art history.

The ‘Genius of language’

2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 367-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christiane Schlaps
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Dynamic Form ◽  
Text Types ◽  
Scientific Value ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Static Concept ◽  
Interior Part

Summary The so-called ‘genius of language’ may be regarded as one of the most influential, and versatile, metalinguistic metaphors used to describe vernacular languages from the 17th century onwards. Over the centuries, philosophers, grammarians, trans­lators and language critics etc. wrote of the ‘genius of language’ in a wide range of text types and with reference to various linguistic positions so that a set of rather diverse types of the concept was created. This paper traces three prominent stages in the development of the ‘genius of language’ argument and, by identifying some of the most frequent types as they evolved in the context of the various linguistic dis­courses, endeavours to show the major transformations of the concept. While early on, discussion of the stylistic and grammatical type of the ‘genius of language’ concentrates on surface features in the languages considered, during the middle of the 18th century, the ‘genius of language’ is relocated to the semantic, interior part of language. With the 19th-century notion of an organological ‘genius of language’, the former static concept is personified and recast in a dynamic form until, taken to its nationalistic extremes, the ‘genius of language’ argument finally ceases to be of any epistemological and scientific value.

scholarly journals NEW SPIRITUAL LITERATURE OF THE END OF 18TH CENTURY - BEGINNING OF THE 19TH CENTURY (TO THE PROBLEM OF SEARCHING FOR UNKNOWN MANUSCRIPTS)

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (5) ◽  
pp. 783-787
Author(s):  
K.Yu. Anders-Namzhilova
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Information Source ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Scientific Society ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
The 19Th Century

The article describes the problem of searching for unknown manuscripts in the study of new spiritual literature that occurred in the Russian Empire at the turn of 18th century. The documents of Moscow Ecclesiastical Censor’s Archive are the main information source of church and religious materials written during that period. The Moscow Ecclesiastical Censor was the first specialized authority established by Synod in 1799 for considering the religious compositions. Compositions which were banned by censors couldn’t be printed and for this reason they become unknown even for modern scientific society. However, a lot of these compositions weren’t lost: they are kept in manuscripts which are dispersed throughout different archive and library funds, that’s why they cannot be attributed without the engagement of the censor committee’s archive documents.

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