Taoist Culture Design: The Development of the Design Ideas

The cultural development of “Tao” and “Qi” has lasted for thousands of years. The theory of “Tao” began with Laozi and Zhuangzi. Through “The Book of Changes · Xici,” it is developed as “the metaphysical is the Tao, and the figurative is the Qi [1]”. “Tao” and “Qi” are interdependent as philosophical concepts. It first guided the philosophy of Taoism, Confucianism and other scholars in the pre-Qin period, and then promoted the development of national system in Xia, Shang and Zhou Dynasty, which gave birth to the aesthetic system of the ancient imperial court. With the development of modern design ideas, the design ideas of “Tao” and “Qi” are integrated. After thousands of years of civilization development and technological changes, today’s ideas of “Tao” and “Qi” are booming, and have in-depth exchanges and integration with foreign cultures.

The grammatical expression of social relations in Japanese

Changes in the functions of Japanese honorifics have accompanied changes in Japanese society over the course of a millennium, revealing strong evidence of mutual influence. The system began as a way of indexing respect for social superiors and humility of inferiors, allowing interactants to acknowledge allotted positions within a complex, hierarchical social system—the Japanese imperial court. This focus on the role of honorifics in reinforcing established, metaphorically vertical social relations is strongly maintained in the language ideologies of contemporary Japan. However, political and societal changes in pre-modern and early modern Japan and subsequent developments during the country’s rapid modernization were associated with the development of the honorific system into one that has far broader functions related to indexing other dimensions of social distance. While expressing vertical distance remains one important function of honorifics in Standard Japanese today, their use in marking closeness to ingroup and distance from outgroup has become even more important. The metaphorical expression of horizontal relations between speaker and addressee is the third major way in which honorifics index distance in contemporary Japan. Associated with this change in function has been a clear process of grammaticalization through which lexical honorifics expressing subjective judgements concerning the speaker’s relationship to referents develop over time into grammatical honorifics expressing intersubjective meanings, unrelated to propositional content but relevant only to the relationship between speaker and addressee.

REGULATIONS OF EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITY IN ART WORKSHOPS ST. PETERSBURG ACADEMY OF SCIENCES (1720-1760)

Проведено историко-педагогическое исследование становления нормативной базы художественного образования в России. Определены регламенты подготовки мастеров художественных ремесел в различных ведомствах Санкт-Петербургской академии наук: Канцелярии от строений, Кабинете императорского двора, Гоф-интендантской конторе, Адмиралтейств-коллегии, Рисовальной палате, Типографии, Мануфактур-коллегии. Изучены предпосылки формирования центра художественного образования и системы обучения будущих мастеров изобразительного искусства . A historical and pedagogical study of the formation of the normative base of art education in Russia is carried out. The regulations for the training of masters of artistic crafts in various departments of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences are defined: The Office of the buildings, the Office of the Imperial court, the Quartermaster's Office, the Admiralty Board, the Drawing Chamber, the Printing House, the Manufactory Board. The prerequisites for the formation of an art education center and a training system for future masters of fine arts are studied.

Selfhood and Subjectivity in Sufi Thought: Image of a Mole on Emperor Akbar’s Nose

This paper addresses the making of portrait-images of Mughal emperors, in which distinctness and particularity in individual features distinguished portraits of emperor Akbar from his ancestors and successors. Scholars have argued that the technique of ‘accurate’ portraits or mimesis was introduced to Mughal artists with the arrival of renaissance paintings and prints from Europe, brought by Jesuit priests to the Mughal court. However, the question of why Mughal emperors saw a need to arrive at portraiture in the likeness of individuals remains to be addressed. This paper argues that the desire to portray a ruler, in all his individual particularity, can arise only within a literary and intellectual matrix in which the individual is valued and where ideas about selfhood and subjectivity have already permeated the philosophical, political, and literary thought. Tracing the transhistorical and transcultural migration of ideas and motifs from Timurid Central Asia to Mughal India, this paper examines the transference of Sufi thought on image-making practices, particularly portraiture, in the imperial court of the Mughals in early seventeenth century. Keywords: Portrait-images of Akbar, subjectivity, Sufi thought, poetics between text and image.

Opportunism in Foreign Affairs in First Century BCE China: Chen Tang, His Fellows, and Their Patrons

By examining the career of a contingent of action-prone mid-level military officers and diplomats, this article aims to explore how opportunism functioned in foreign affairs during the last decades of the Former Han dynasty (202 BCE–9 CE). To safeguard and advance the empire’s interests, especially in Central Asia, these characters would carry out their missions with expediency, usually by the means of assassination and surprise attacks, and sometimes without formal authorization. Yet their successful operations always earned, if retrospectively, the endorsement of the imperial court, which in turn encouraged further ventures. The investigation of the front-line opportunists and their patrons presents a lively picture of the politics and political culture of the time.

“There Are Two”

This chapter introduces a letter written in Rome in the 490s CE by an African pope, Gelasius I. This papal letter is addressed to a Roman augustus at the imperial court in Constantinople. And in this letter, there is a world-historical idea. Gelasius formulates a claim without which the political history of Rome—and thus, of Europe (and many of its former colonies)—cannot be reconstructed. And this form of words could not be simpler. For, this African pope merely writes in Latin: duo sunt. This means in English: “there are two”. If roughly a century of historiography can be trusted, the history of empire is altered by this late antique pope’s cool insistence that “there are two”. How could such a minimal claim ignite centuries of legal reflection and political contestation in Europe? This chapter begins to answer that question.

Japanese Food Offerings

Food offerings are one of the most interesting aspects of Shinto rituals. Some involve an enormous variety of foodstuff and constitute extraordinary examples of food preparation and presentation. Many of these offerings are based on ancient sources and are prepared according to protocols established at the imperial court in the Muromachi period, if not earlier. This article explores some features of Shinto food offerings, with special focus on the Upper and Lower Kamo Shrines, Iwashimizu Hachimangū shrine, and the Grand Shrines of Ise, and proposes some theoretical perspectives on how to study them from the perspectives of gift giving, sacrifice, and taboo.

Performing Emperorship

To be an emperor was a performance, which kept the emperor in power as long as it fulfilled a need in his subjects. The imperial court and its courtiers were the essential background for this performance. Coronation robes had to be invented and court dress designed and minutely regulated in order to mark gradations in rank among courtiers and officials. An extensive system of medals, honours, and decorations was used in all territories to reward those close to the crown and bind them to the emperor. In India, the viceregal court had to represent the might and magnificence of a distant empress and ensure the loyalty of the Indian princes who ruled a third of India.