China in the Nineteenth Century: A New Cage Opens Up

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1 University Press Scholarship Online You are looking at 1-8 of 8 items for: keywords : Chinese civilization Heritage of China Paul Ropp (ed.) Item type: book california/ The thirteen chapters in this volume, all by experts in the field of Chinese studies, reflect the diversity of approaches scholars follow in the study of China's past. Together they reveal the depth and vitality of Chinese civilization and demonstrate how an understanding of traditional China can enrich and broaden our own contemporary worldview. China in the Nineteenth Century: A New Cage Opens Up Paul U. Unschuld in What Is Medicine?: Western and Eastern Approaches to Healing Published in print: 2009 Published Online: May ISBN: eisbn: california/ The cultural upper class of Chinese civilization had been adhered to a medicine that owed its plausibility to the structures of the ancient unification of kingdoms for two millennia, from the first century bc to the nineteenth century. It equally owed its plausibility to the sociopolitical ideals of the Confucian and legalistic social philosophers. The ancient doctrines of social theory had become rigid over the centuries. The structures of the ancient empire were now dated. The empire faltered in the nineteenth and fell at the beginning of the twentieth century. Totally new ways of organizing social life were first promoted as ideals and later formed into reality. Customary medical thinking did not have a chance, even for short-term survival. A few insistent authors' verbose, anachronistic attempt to halt the threatening decline but in vain. Page 1 of 5

2 Western Perceptions of China from the Late Sixteenth Century to the Present Paul S. Ropp in Heritage of China: Contemporary Perspectives on Chinese Civilization california/ This book portrays for the general reader or the beginning student of China some of the diverse achievements and distinctive characteristics of traditional Chinese civilization, not for their economic or foreign policy implications but rather as significant elements of common human experience. Comparisons between traditional China and the contemporary West are usually very misleading. By comparing China and the West over a span of centuries, it becomes abundantly apparent that contemporary Western ways of living and thinking are of very recent origin. Several chapters in this book investigate how China and the West have affected each other in different areas, but the chapters as a whole suggest that such influences have not been terribly important in either culture. Other chapters show the inadequacy of old stereotypes of a changeless China. The Evolution of Government in China Paul S. Ropp in Heritage of China: Contemporary Perspectives on Chinese Civilization california/ This chapter explores the origins of Chinese civilization. It also explains the relative optimism of the early Chinese. Furthermore, the evolution of Chinese culture in the Neolithic and early Bronze Ages is addressed, with particular attention to such subjects as individualism (or its absence), ritual and decorum, bureaucratic control, dependency and obligation, and metaphysical optimism. It integrates early Chinese mortuary practices with other aspects of the culture. The great mythic themes in China were not dying and death but social order and social morality. An inverse relationship exists between an emphasis on hierarchical roles of authority, whether for the living or the dead, and the vagueness with which the afterlife is conceived. The cultural traditions established in the Neolithic and the Bronze Ages of China were ancestral to all Page 2 of 5

3 that followed, continuing to exert their influence down to recent, if not contemporary, times. National Origins and Local Identity Kirk A. Denton in Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China Published in print: 2013 Published Online: November 2016 ISBN: eisbn: Publisher: University of Hawai'i Press DOI: / hawaii/ This chapter begins with a brief overview of the emergence of modern conceptions of history from the late Qing to the 1950s. It then investigates how in some museums in China the ancient past serves national narratives, and how those narratives are beginning to change with the rise of an interest in local identity and the proliferation of local culture museums. In the past two decades, local culture museums, and the archaeological excavations upon which these museums rely for their collections, have contributed to the breakdown of the conventional view of the origins of Chinese civilization in the Central Plains and to a new narrative centered around the idea of multiple points of origin, one that sits nicely with the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) discourse of China as a multiethnic nation-state. Health and Disease in Heaven s Ford RUTH ROGASKI in Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China Published in print: 2004 Published Online: March ISBN: eisbn: california/ This chapter reviews the practices of weisheng in the daily life of Tianjin before the city was open to foreign settlement. Using Tianjin's herbs, foods, and popular meditation manuals, the city's residents strengthened their bodies against the vagaries of the environment and the exigencies of Tianjin's social crises. Tianjin before the arrival of Europeans may not have been a salubrious arcadia, but one must allow that strategies for guarding life in Heaven's Ford were to a considerable degree effective in preserving health. Charles Rosenberg has suggested that explanations for illnesses revolve around two poles: configuration and contamination. Tianjin in the mid-nineteenth century was a vibrant society whose people Page 3 of 5

4 strove to achieve health and prevent disease on their own terms. By the end of the nineteenth century, the perceived lack of government involvement in matters of disease prevention would become a powerful symbol of the deficiency of Chinese civilization. Cultural Heritage Management in China Chen Shen and Hong Chen in Cultural Heritage Management: A Global Perspective Published in print: 2010 Published Online: September 2011 ISBN: eisbn: Publisher: University Press of Florida DOI: /florida/ China has a rich and diverse cultural heritage representing the foundation of Chinese civilizations and cultural traditions. In the past two decades, China has demonstrated stunning economic development, providing unprecedented opportunities for implementing managerial measures for cultural heritage conservation. This chapter discusses the practices of China's cultural heritage management (CHM) in relation to current economic development in the nation, and the problems arising from the challenges commonly seen during the development stage. It focuses on the existing system of CHM in China, evaluating common policies and practices, and then it looks at problems of CHM for the ongoing South-to-North Water Transfer Project that exemplifies the current problems of CHM practices in China. Leaving for the Rising Sun Jiang Wu Published in print: 2014 Published Online: January 2015 ISBN: eisbn: Item type: book Publisher: Oxford University Press DOI: / acprof:oso/ This book investigates the intellectual, social, and religious background of Chinese Zen master Yinyuan s move to Japan in 1654 and the founding of Manpukuji in Fully immersed in the Late Ming Buddhist revival, Yinyuan followed a syncretic Buddhist practice but claimed to inherit the authentic transmission from the Linji sect. He arrived in Japan during the Ming-Qing transition and was quickly installed by the bakufu as symbol for representing China in a Japan-centered world order. His presence in Edo Japan engendered various responses from Japanese Buddhists and intellectuals who sought the meaning of authenticity from Yinyuan. However, the image of his authenticity was questioned and the symbolic presence of Chinese monks was disrupted during the Page 4 of 5

5 early eighteenth century when China and Japan tightened their control over the Nagasaki trade. Situating Yinyuan and the religious events related to him in a broad understanding of the seventeenth-century crisis in early Modern East Asia, this book explains the success and fall of Yinyuan and his tradition in terms of the Authenticity Crisis, meaning that Yinyuan s claim of religious, political, and cultural authenticity was facing challenges at the wake of a rising Japan-centered identity in Edo Japan. Through the case of Yinyuan, this study seeks to interpret the intellectual and cultural transformation in early modern East Asia as manifestations of the Authenticity Crisis. This book provides new perspectives for rethinking the symbolic role of Buddhist monks in the process of intellectual, political, and social transformation. Page 5 of 5