The Tang Empire

2021 ◽  
pp. 380-400
Author(s):  
Mark Edward Lewis
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Tang Dynasty ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Local Market ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Interregional Trade ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Labor Service ◽  
The Tang Dynasty

The Tang dynasty reunited continental East Asia using institutions inherited from the nomad-dominated Northern dynasties: state-owned land; exactions of grain, cloth, and labor service levied on notional “average” households; a hereditary “divisional army” concentrated around the capital and professional soldiers at the frontier, cities divided into walled wards with state-administered markets; a hereditary, imperial super-elite; and state-sponsored Buddhism and Daoism. The An Lushan Rebellion in the mid-eighth century eliminated these institutions. In their place emerged the major characteristics of late-imperial China: a fiscal system that assessed actual wealth and taxed trade; a new pattern of state service based on textual, technical, and military expertise measured by examinations; large-scale interregional trade through purely commercial entrepôts and local market towns; the incorporation of China into a multistate East Asian world; and the linkage of continental East Asia into a world economy through oceanic trans-shipment of commodities.

Qing Women's Poetry on Roaming as a Female Transcendent

NAN Nü ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yanning Wang
Keyword(s):  
Tang Dynasty ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Women's Poetry ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Women's Culture ◽  
Literary Images ◽  
The Tang Dynasty ◽  
Scholarly Attention

AbstractYouxian shi (poetry on roaming as a transcendent) has long been a conventional poetic genre in Chinese literature. It has been the common conception that youxian poetry was most popular from the Wei dynasty (220-265) through the Tang dynasty (618-907), and up until now, scholarly studies on the genre seemed to focus exclusively on Tang and pre-Tang periods. This gives the impression that after the Tang nothing of interest was written in this particular genre. Consequently, very little scholarly attention has been given to the youxian poems composed in post-Tang periods. This article examines youxian poems by Qing (1644-1911) women, specifically those poems entitled Nü youxian (roaming as a female transcendent). With the increasing consciousness of "self," the rise of groups of women writers, and the popularity of women's culture in late imperial China, youxian poems provided a unique literary space for women's poetic and autobiographical voices, certainly deserving more scholarly attention. I argue that by presenting female transcendents or women pursuing transcendence at the center of a poem and re-inscribing the traditional literary images, the poets created a stronger female subjectivity that reflected women's desires in their intellectual and spiritual lives. I also propose that nü youxian was a new subgenre of youxian poetry, emerging only in the context of the efflorescence of women's poetry.

scholarly journals Technical features of a ninth-century silver vessel of southern China uncovered from Famen Monastery, Shaanxi province

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Panpan Tan ◽  
Junchang Yang ◽  
Xinlai Ren
Keyword(s):  
Tang Dynasty ◽  
Southern China ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Shaanxi Province ◽  
Non Invasive ◽  
Cu Alloy ◽  
Scientific Analysis ◽  
The Tang Dynasty ◽  
Technical Details ◽  
Technical Features

AbstractSilver art is an important feature of the Tang dynasty in China and the manufacturing center for silver shifted from north to south after the mid-eighth century CE. The typology, stylistics, and iconography of silver vessels from both regions have been studied in detail. However, their technical characteristics have rarely been discussed, in particular, those of the southern ones. The current study presents a non-invasive scientific analysis on a partially-gilded silver box from Jiangnanxidao of Tang (southern China), uncovered from the pagoda crypt of the Famen Monastery, Shaanxi province. The results reveal that the box was made of refined silver from cupellation, and composed of five pieces, brazed together with hard solder. Ag–Cu alloy was identified to braze the ring foot and the box bottom. Brazing, hammering, engraving, repoussé, chasing, punching, and partial fire-gilding were employed to shape and decorate the box. More strikingly, the comparative analysis of technical details between this southern box and the previously reported northern silver vessels demonstrates that the former is more precise. Moreover, the similarities in motif expressions of southern-origin silver vessels after the mid-eighth century CE and northern-origin silver vessels before the mid-eighth century CE reflect the inheritance of decorative style. These differences and inheritance indicate that southern artisans after the mid-eighth century CE inherited the decorative technology of the northern-origin silver vessels before the mid-eighth century CE and developed them to greater perfection. The current study presents novel insights into the silver technology of southern China during the late Tang dynasty.

Local Elites and Scholarship in Late Imperial China

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven B. Miles
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Song Dynasty ◽  
Tang Dynasty ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Local Elites ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Southern Song ◽  
Local Schools ◽  
Scholarly Production ◽  
Intellectual Movements

Before the end of the Tang dynasty, cultural production was largely a court-centered activity. This began to change as the nature of China’s political, social, and cultural elite, the literati (shi), was transformed by the Southern Song dynasty. Henceforth, the elite of China was primarily a local elite, occasionally producing holders of high office but primarily focusing on activities in their home areas to achieve and maintain their status. One important activity was scholarship, which involved such activities as establishing private academies (shuyuan) and the production of texts such as gazetteers and anthologies, many of which were concerned with the locales in which they were produced. The late imperial period, beginning in the Song, witnessed alternating periods of statist and localist turns, as the initiative in scholarly production shifted between the imperial court and local elites. Intellectual movements such as Neo-Confucianism and evidential research (kaozheng) fed into the production of localist texts and the formation of regional or local schools of scholarship.

Jesuit Scientia and Natural Studies in Late Imperial China, 1600-18001

2002 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-232
Author(s):  
Benjamin A. Elman
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Cultural Control ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Court ◽  
Government Bureaucracy ◽  
Tea Production ◽  
Imperial China ◽  
The Government

AbstractArguably, by 1600 Europe was ahead of China in producing basic machines such as clocks, screws, levers, and pulleys that would be applied increasingly to the mechanization of agricultural and industrial production. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, Europeans still sought the technological secrets for silk production, textile weaving, porcelain making, and large scale tea production from the Chinese. Chinese literati in turn, before 1800, borrowed new algebraic notations (of Hindu-Arabic origins), Tychonic cosmology, Euclidean geometry, spherical trigonometry, and arithmetic and trigonometric logarithms from Europe. Until 1990, Chinese elites and their Manchu rulers interpreted the transition in early modern Europe—from new forms of scientific knowledge to new modes of industrial power—on their own terms. Each side made a virtue out of the mutually contested accommodation project, and each converted the other's forms of natural studies into acceptable local conventions of knowledge. The Ming and Qing imperial court induced Jesuit calendrical, military, and land mensuration experts to work as imperial minions in the government bureaucracy to augment each dynasty's own project of political and cultural control. Consequently, it would be a historiographical mistake to underestimate Chinese efforts to master on their own terms the Western learning of the Jesuits in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.

scholarly journals TOWARD A WIDER AUDIENCE, SYSTEMATIC APPROACH OF REINTERPRETATION AND REPRESENTATION OF THE EAST MAIN HALL OF FOGUANG TEMPLE BASED ON DIGITAL DOCUMENTATION AND 3D VISUALIZATION TECHNIQUES

2021 ◽  
Vol XLVI-M-1-2021 ◽  
pp. 395-402
Author(s):  
Z. Y. Li ◽  
Y. Gu ◽  
R. Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Tang Dynasty ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
3D Visualization ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Tang Dynasty ◽  
Digital Documentation ◽  
Visualization Techniques

Abstract. Rebuilt in 857 AD, the East Main Hall of Foguang Temple is the highest ranking wooden architecture to survive from the Tang Dynasty, and is regarded as a rare cultural and architectural gem of China and of the world at large1. Since its rediscovery in 1937, extensive research on the East Main Hall of Foguang Temple has been conducted, mostly about its high values and methods applicable to its conservation and management, while less attention is given to its interpretation and representation, especially to the public audiences.Based on continued digital documentation and study of the East Main Hall of Foguang Temple by Tsinghua Univeristy and Beijing Guowenyan Cultural Heritage Conservation Center over the past 16 years, this paper is a comprehensive overview of the ongoing systematic attempt to leverage digital documentation and acquired research results as content and tool for heritage interpretation and presentation. The works involved include translation of digital survey and documentation of the wooden structure, colored statues and murals of Foguang Temple as content in three approaches: the first approach is the development of an on-site digital display system for Foguang Temple; the second approach involves the planning and designing of a large-scale interactive museum exhibition; the third approach, which wraps up the whole system into a public-centered storytelling experience, involves an ongoing animation series on air at multiple social media platforms that tells unknown stories about Foguang Temple. All three approaches are intended at developing emotional connections between the public and the cultural heritage through reinterpretation and representation, with the aim of making heritage dissemination more dialogical and sustainable by bringing history to life.

COMMUNAL RELIGION IN JIANGNAN DELTA RURAL VILLAGES IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hamashima Atsutoshi
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Crop Yields ◽  
Sea Transport ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
Rural Villages ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
The North ◽  
Imperial China ◽  
One Year

This article addresses the broad question of the sense of community in traditional Chinese villages, through consideration of popular cults found throughout the most highly developed region in Late Imperial China: the Jiangnan Delta. A key clue is a large-scale tenant-farmer revolt in Zhaowen County in 1846. When the uprising was suppressed, not only were twenty human ringleaders executed, but images of four local gods from village temples, who were believed to have sanctioned the rebellion, were also seized by the authorities and exposed for one year at the gates of the Zhaowen County City God temple. All four had three characteristics in common: (1) they were anthropomorphic, with human names; (2) they had living descendants of the same surname; (3) all were associated with stories involving miraculous protection of tax grain transport to the North. The descendants of these gods, all possession-type spirit mediums, or shamans, based in the villages, created the gods in response to the needs of their clients, large-scale landlords who bore responsibility for sea transport of tax grain to the North. In the mid-sixteenth century, fundamental socio-economic changes took place in the Jiangnan Delta. The landlords disappeared from the villages, leaving only the farmers, who were turning to cottage industries for cash to supplement inadequate food crop yields. The spirit mediums responded to the changes and modified their gods for a new set of clients, resulting in the survival of these cults down to the present day.

The Demise of Silk on the Silk Road: Textiles as Money at Dunhuang from the Late Eighth Century to the Thirteenth Century

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
ERIC TROMBERT
Keyword(s):  
Tang Dynasty ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Silk Road ◽  
First Semester ◽  
Monetary System ◽  
The Tang Dynasty ◽  
Accounting Report ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Silk Road

The extensive documentary evidence collected and analysed in the previous studies in this issue suggest a preliminary conclusion that can be summarised as follows: from the collapse of the Han dynasty to the glorious days of the Tang dynasty, the peoples living in the Western Regions along the Silk Road used multiple co-existing forms of money – grain, cloth and coins – with one of these three items becoming predominant according to changes in political and/or economic circumstances. However, this multicurrency system did not outlive the political, economic and fiscal upheavals that shook the Tang empire from the mid-eighth century onwards. As far as the materials from Turfan and Dunhuang are concerned, the latest evidence for this monetary system is provided by a manuscript found at Dunhuang (P 3348 V°), already quoted in Arakawa Masaharu's article, which permits us to see how such a complex monetary system worked in real life once the silk shipped by the Tang government arrived in the Western Regions. In particular, a subsidiary account (P 3348 V°2 B) inscribed in this accounting report reveals how a local official called Li Jingyu 李景玉, who was vice-commissioner in the army stationed in that region, received his salary for the first semester of the year 745 ce.

scholarly journals The Representation of Military Troops in Pingcheng Tombs and the Private Household Institution of Buqu in Practice

Asian Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-243
Author(s):  
Chin-Yin Tseng
Keyword(s):  
Tang Dynasty ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Life After Death ◽  
Point Of Interest ◽  
Mural Paintings ◽  
Archaeological Materials ◽  
The Tang Dynasty ◽  
Northern Wei

In Northern Wei tombs of the Pingcheng period (398–494 CE), we notice a recurrence of the depiction of armed men in both mural paintings and tomb figurines, not in combat but positioned in formation. Consisting of infantry soldiers alongside light and heavy cavalry accompanied by flag bearers, such a military scene presents itself as a point of interest amidst the rest of the funerary setting. Is this supposed to be an indication that the tomb occupant had indeed commanded such an impressive set of troops in life? Or had the families commissioned this theme as part of the tomb repertoire simply in hopes of providing protection over the deceased in their life after death? If we set the examination of this type of image against textual history, the household institution of buqu retainers that began as early as the Xin (“New”) Dynasty (9–23 CE) and was codified in the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE), serving as private retainer corps of armed men to powerful families, appears to be the type of social institution reified in the archaeological materials mentioned above. The large-scale appearance of these military troops inside Pingcheng period tombs might even suggest that with the “tribal policy” in place, the Han Chinese practice of keeping buqu retainers became a convenient method for the Tuoba to manage recently conquered tribal confederations, shifting clan loyalty based on bloodline to household loyalty based on the buqu institution, one with a long social tradition in Chinese history.  

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