China on the Sea

How the Maritime World Shaped Modern China
Erscheinungsjahr 2011
ISBN: 978-90-04-28160-8
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 21, 362 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 231 mm, Gewicht: 558 g

Reihe: China Studies

Generations of Chinese scholars have made China synonymous with the Great Wall and presented its civilization as fundamentally land-bound. This volume challenges this perspective, demonstrating that China was not a “Walled Kingdom”, certainly not since the Yongjia Disturbance in 311. China reached out to the maritime world far more actively than historians have acknowledged, while the seas and what came from the seas—from Islam, fragrances and Jesuits to maize, opium and clocks—significantly changed the course of history, and have been of inestimable importance to China since the Ming. This book integrates the maritime history of China, especially the Qing period, a subject which has hitherto languished on the periphery of scholarly analysis, into the mainstream of current historical narrative. It was the seas that made Tang China a “Cosmopolitan Empire” (Mark Lewis), the Song dynasty China’s “Greatest Age” (John Fairbank), China at 1600 “the largest and most sophisticated of all unified realms on earth” (Jonathan Spence), and the reign of the three Qing emperors (Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong) China’s “last golden age” (Charles Hucker).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Yangwen, Zheng

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Geschichte der Schifffahrt

Über Autor(innen)

Zheng Yangwen is Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester. She is the author of The Social Life of Opium in China, which has been translated into Italian and Korean. She is also the editor of Negotiating Asymmetry: China’s Place in Asia (with Anthony Reid); The Body in Asia (with Bryan S. Turner); Personal Names in Asia: History, Culture and Identity (with Charles J-H Macdonald); The Cold War in Asia: the Battle for Hearts and Minds (with Hong Liu and Michael Szonyi); and The Chinese Chameleon Revisited: from the Jesuits to Zhang Yimou.