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W. Wayne Farris has developed the first systematic analysis of early Japanese population, the role of disease in economic development, and the impact of agricultural technology and practices. In doing so, he reinterprets the nature of ritsuryo institutions.

In Lineages Embedded in Temple Networks, Richard Wang explores the key role played by elite Daoists in social and cultural life in Ming China, notably by mediating between local networks and the state through their clerical lineages-empire-wide networks channeling knowledge and resources-and by controlling central temples.

Through an exploration of contemporary Chinese popular religion from its cultural, social, and material perspectives, Wei-Ping Lin paints a broad picture of the dynamics of popular religion in Taiwan. Analyzing these aspects of religious practice in a unified framework, she traces their transformation as adherents move from villages to cities.

The first book of its kind in any Western language, Wang Anshi and Song Poetic Culture brings into focus a cluster of issues that are central to the understanding of both the poet and his cultural milieu. Together, the chapters form a varied mosaic of Wang Anshi's work and its critical reception in the larger context of Song poetic culture.

Building for Oil is a historical account of the oil town of Daqing in northeastern China during the formative years of the People's Republic and describes Daqing's rise and fall as a national model city. Hou Li traces the roots of the Chinese socialist state and its early industrialization and modernization policies.

Celestial Masters is the first book in any Western language devoted solely to the founding of Daoism. It traces the movement from the mid-second century CE through the sixth century, and provides a detailed analysis of ritual life within the movement, covering the roles of common believer or Daoist citizen, novice, and priest or libationer.

In his reading of the Shishuo xinyu, the most important anecdotal collection of medieval China, Jack W. Chen presents an extended meditation on the anecdote form, both what it affords in terms of representing a social community and how it provides a space for the rehearsal of certain longstanding philosophical and cultural arguments.

Lucas Bender considers Du Fu's pivotal role in the transformation of Chinese poetic understanding over the last millennium. Du Fu anticipated important philosophical transitions from the late-medieval into the early-modern period and laid the template for a new and perduring paradigm of poetry's relationship to ethics.

Alexander Des Forges reads shiwen from a literary perspective, showing how the examination essay redefined prose aesthetics, transformed the work of writing, and marked the aesthetic as a key arena for contestation of authority as candidates, examiners, and critics joined to form a dominant social class of literary producers.

Structures of the Earth is the first study of the emergent genre of geographical writing and the metageographies that structured its spatial thought during the "Age of Disunion" and continue to illuminate spatial complexities that have been incompatible with the imperial and nationalist ideal of a monolithic China at the center of the world.

The Mongol conquest of north China inflicted terrible destruction, wiping out more than one-third of the population and dismantling the existing social order. Jinping Wang recounts the riveting story of how northern Chinese people adapted to these trying circumstances and interacted with their conquerors to create a drastically new social order.

This book examines the evolution of Daoist beliefs about human liability and redemption over eight centuries and outlines ritual procedures for rescuing an ill-starred destiny, focusing on the Daoist vocabulary of bondage and redemption, the changing meanings of sacrifice, and metaphoric conceptualizations bridging the visible and invisible realms.

Early medieval writers in China understood and manipulated a shared intellectual lexicon to produce meaning. Wendy Swartz explores how these writers developed a distinctive mosaic of ways to participate in their cultural heritage by weaving textual strands from a shared and expanding store of literary resources into new patterns and configurations.

The third century CE-the Jian'an era or Three Kingdoms-holds double significance for the Chinese cultural tradition. Its writings laid the foundation of classical poetry and literary criticism. Its historical personages and events also inspired works of art throughout Chinese history. Xiaofei Tian examines the interface of these two nostalgias.

Ancestors, Kings, and the Dao outlines the evolution of musical performance in early China, first within and then ultimately away from the socio-religious context of ancestor worship. The focus of this study is on excavated texts; it is the first to use both bronze and bamboo narratives to show the evolution of a single ritual practice.

Bannermen Tales is the first book in English to offer a comprehensive study of zidishu-a popular storytelling genre created by the Manchus in early eighteenth-century Beijing. With original translations, musical score, and numerous illustrations of hand-copied and printed texts, this study opens a new window into Qing literature.

Tamara T. Chin explores the politics of representation during the Han dynasty at a pivotal moment when China was asserting imperialist power on the Eurasian continent and expanding its local and long-distance ("Silk Road") markets. Chin explains why rival political groups introduced new literary forms with which to represent these expanded markets.

Timothy Brook studies three widely separated and economically dissimilar counties. He draws on rich data in monastic gazetteers to examine the patterns and social consequences of patronage.

Suyoung Son examines the widespread practice of self-publishing by writers in late imperial China, focusing on the relationships between manuscript tradition and print convention, peer patronage and popular fame, and gift exchange and commercial transactions in textual production and circulation.

The Qing Empire in the early nineteenth century faced bureaucratic corruption, food shortages, infrastructure decay, domestic rebellion, adverse balances of trade, and a previously inconceivable foreign threat from the West. William T. Rowe uses literati reformer Bao Shichen as a prism to understand contemporary response to this general crisis.

Ellen Widmer examines the writings of a literary family whose works embodied shifting attitudes toward women in late Qing China. She illuminates the diachronic bridge between the late Qing and the preceding period, the synchronic interplay of genres during the family's lifetimes, and the interaction of Shanghai publishing with other regions.

The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE-800 CE investigates what dreams meant in late classical and early medieval China. Mapping a common dreamscape that underlies manuals of dream interpretation, scriptural instructions, and other texts, Robert Ford Campany sheds light on how people in a distant age wrestled with-and celebrated-the strangeness of dreams.

In the first book focusing on premortem shrines in any era of Chinese history, Sarah Schneewind places the institution at the intersection of politics and religion. This legitimate, institutionalized political voice for commoners expands a scholarly understanding of "public opinion" in late imperial China, and illuminates Ming thought and politics.

Using the new tools of GIS and social network analysis, Nicolas Tackett shows that the great Tang aristocratic families were more successful than previously believed in adapting to social and economic changes in the seventh and eighth centuries. Tang political influence waned only after many of them were killed during the three decades after 880.

Feeling the Past in Seventeenth-Century China highlights the central role played by the body in writers' memories during the Ming-Qing cataclysm. Sight, sound, taste, and touch configured ordinary experiences next to traumatic events. This embodied experience reveals literature's mission of remembrance as a moral endeavor in cultural continuity.

Through research into Daoist ritual in history and as it survives today, Andersen shows that the concept of truth in Chinese Daoist philosophy and ritual posits being as a paradox anchored in the inexistent Way, and consists in seeking to be an exception to ordinary norms and rules of behavior which nonetheless engages what is common to us all.

Ethnic Chrysalis is the first book in English to cover the early modern history of the Orochen, an ethnic group that has for centuries inhabited areas now belonging to the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China. Kim examines how the impact of political organization in one era can endure in a group's social and cultural values.

"Song Lyric," ci, is one of the most loved forms of Chinese poetry, radically distinct from "Classical Poetry," shi. Stephen Owen examines song lyric's literary traditions, including its origins, major writers and collections, and development into a genre, while offering a new hypothesis on the relationship between song practice and written text.

Ya Zuo places Shen Gua (1031 1095) on the broad horizon of premodern Chinese thought, and presents his empiricism within an extensive narrative of Chinese epistemology. Her study provides insights into the complex dynamics in play at the dawn of Neo-Confucianism and compels readers to achieve a deeper appreciation of diversity in Chinese thinking.