Explaining Perfection: Quanzhen and Thirteenth-century Chinese Literati

T oung Pao ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 104 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 572-625
Author(s):  
Mark Halperin
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
North China ◽  
Han Dynasty ◽  
Foreign Occupation ◽  
Han Culture ◽  
Confucian Scholar

AbstractThe Quanzhen Daoist order stands as the most dynamic religious element in north China of the tumultuous thirteenth century. Drawing on funeral epitaphs and abbey commemorations, this article illustrates how famous and obscure Confucian scholar-officials interpreted the order’s remarkable success in various ways. Some credited Quanzhen with pruning Daoism of its post-Han dynasty excrescences and reviving the heritage’s basic teachings. For others, Quanzhen marked simply the latest chapter in Daoism’s undimmed heroic history. A third group pointed to the order’s ascetic discipline, which as a matter of course attracted elite and mass devotion. Significantly, epitaphs and commemorations composed by Quanzhen writers sounded similar themes, suggesting that the learned laity and clergy shared a common discourse casting the order as a force for Han culture during foreign occupation.

Food in Chinese Culture

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying-shih Yü
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Han Dynasty ◽  
Ancient China ◽  
Major Aspect ◽  
Han Culture

This article summarizes virtually all of the articles of food and culinary methods and tools in ancient China in the Han Dynasty. It reveals a major aspect of Han culture through its food and culinary methods.

A Social History of the Treasured Canon of the Mysterious Capital in North China under Mongol-Yuan Rule

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Jinping Wang
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
North China ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
Alternate Route ◽  
Political World ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Institutional Network

Abstract The history of the Treasured Canon of the Mysterious Capital, printed and published by Quanzhen Daoists in 1244, demonstrates important changes in social and political relations in north China in the thirteenth century. The Quanzhen Daoist church attracted many former Confucian scholars, established a cross-regional institutional network, coordinated different lineages, and collaborated with Mongolian and Chinese sponsors in the political world to carry out the canon project. The publication of the canon gave rise to new teaching positions for scholarly Daoists in new Daoist-style schools, and offered them an alternate route to spiritual realization, fame, and power. When facing the 1281 canon-burning catastrophe, Quanzhen Daoists produced new inscriptions and steles to erase the canon’s place in earlier Quanzhen activities. Only when the political environment shifted again in favor of the Quanzhen order, did Quanzhen Daoists choose to resurrect the history of the publication of the Treasured Canon of the Mysterious Capital.

The Yak, the Bear and the Dragon: Uneasy Bedfellows. A Cautionary Tale of Russian and Chinese Influences on Mongolian History

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-79
Author(s):  
Thomas Nivison Haining
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
North China ◽  
Near East ◽  
Cautionary Tale

In the early thirteenth century Chinggis Khan used Central Asia and North China and then throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries his successors used China, Eastern Europe, the Near East, even Vietnam, Burma and Korea, as battlegrounds for their campaigns of conquest. Little, perhaps, did the Mongol Great Khans think that some six or seven centuries later their homeland would itself be a battleground, fought over politically if not actually militarily by the empires of Russia and China and by the Communist powers which succeeded those two empires.

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