The Art Of Fate Calculation

From housewives to students and high-ranking officials, people from all social backgrounds in China and Taiwan visit fate calculation masters to learn about their destiny. How do clients assess the diviner’s skills? How does one become a fortune-teller? How is a person’s fate calculated? The Art of Fate Calculation explores how conceptions of fate circulate in Chinese and Taiwanese societies while resisting uniformization and institutionalization. This is not only due to the stigma of “superstition” but also to the internal dynamic of fate calculation practice and learning.

Though there are a number of well-written works on Chinese divination, there are none that deal with the three sophisticated devices that were employed by the Chinese Astronomical Bureau in the eleventh century and for hundreds of years thereafter. Chinese experts applied the methods associated with these devices to both weather forecasting and to the interpretation of human affairs. Hidden by a veil of secrecy, these methods have always been relatively little known other than by their names. The first work in any language to explore these three methods, known as sanshi (three cosmic boards), this book sheds light on a topic which has been shrouded in mystery for centuries, having been kept secret for many years by the Chinese Astronomical Bureau.

Fascinating introduction to traditional Chinese concepts of li, qi, shu, yin, yang, wuxing, and yijing. Other topics covered: Chinese mathematics, astronomy and astrology, alchemy, magic, elixirs, and the search for immortality.

Accurate risk assessment is critical to pesticide regulation. This authoritative reference provides an exhaustive evaluation of current agrochemical environmental fate studies, a critical review of current EPA pesticide assessment guidelines, and a wide variety of environmental simulation models. Divided into four sections, this well-organized book provides a wealth of data and information vital to anyone involved in environmental exposure assessment, groundwater, surface water, and water contamination, pesticide regulation, and environmental simulation modeling. At your fingertips, you will have the latest information on the development of meaningful environmental fate data and how this information will result in accurate assessment of potential environmental and human hazards. The inadequacy of current regulatory guidelines and the resulting nonscientific assessment of agrochemical environmental fate are discussed in detail. A wide variety of environmental fate studies are included to demonstrate the current use of data to assess environmental fate and potential hazards associated with agrochemical use. Finally, ten chapters discuss the use of computer models that have been developed for analyzing and integrating data from a variety of environmental fate studies on agrochemicals used under various field conditions.

This fascinating book presents the unusual career of a scientist of Chinese Malaysian origin, Ho Peng Yoke, who became a humanist and rendered his services to both Eastern and Western intellectual worlds. It describes how Ho adapted to working under changing social and academic environments in Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Hong Kong and England. His activities also covered East Asia, Europe and North America.Ho Peng Yoke worked in collaboration with Joseph Needham of Cambridge over different periods spanning half a century in the monumental series Science and Civilization in China. Ho subsequently succeeded Needham as Director of the Needham Research Institute, where he held the post for 12 years. In the introduction to the final volume of that series, the Oxford scholar Mark Elvin remarked that Ho ?had long piloted the ship through difficult times.? This book tells the story and more.

China has an age-old zoomorphic tradition. The First Emperor was famously said to have had the heart of a tiger and a wolf. The names of foreign tribes were traditionally written with characters that included animal radicals. In modern times, the communist government frequently referred to Nationalists as “running dogs,” and President Xi Jinping, vowing to quell corruption at all levels, pledged to capture both “the tigers” and “the flies.” Splendidly illustrated with works ranging from Bronze Age vessels to twentieth-century conceptual pieces, this volume is a wide-ranging look at zoomorphic and anthropomorphic imagery in Chinese art. The contributors, leading scholars in Chinese art history and related fields, consider depictions of animals not as simple, one-for-one symbolic equivalents: they pursue in depth, in complexity, and in multiple dimensions the ways that Chinese have used animals from earliest times to the present day to represent and rhetorically stage complex ideas about the world around them, examining what this means about China, past and present. In each chapter, a specific example or theme based on real or mythic creatures is derived from religious, political, or other sources, providing the detailed and learned examination needed to understand the means by which such imagery was embedded in Chinese cultural life. Bronze Age taotie motifs, calendrical animals, zoomorphic modes in Tantric Buddhist art, Song dragons and their painters, animal rebuses, Heaven-sent auspicious horses and foreign-sent tribute giraffes, the fantastic specimens depicted in the Qing Manual of Sea Oddities, the weirdly indeterminate creatures found in the contemporary art of Huang Yong Ping—these and other notable examples reveal Chinese attitudes over time toward the animal realm, explore Chinese psychology and patterns of imagination, and explain some of the critical means and motives of Chinese visual culture. The Zoomorphic Imagination in Chinese Art and Culture will find a ready audience among East Asian art and visual culture specialists and those with an interest in literary or visual rhetoric. Contributors: Sarah Allan, Qianshen Bai, Susan Bush, Daniel Greenberg, Carmelita (Carma) Hinton, Judy Chungwa Ho, Kristina Kleutghen, Kathlyn Liscomb, Jennifer Purtle, Jerome Silbergeld, Henrik Sørensen, and Eugene Y. Wang.

The notions of labour, mobility and piety have a complex and intertwined relationship. Using ethnographic methods and a historical perspective, Temple Tracks critically outlines the interlink of railway construction in colonial and post-colonial Asia, as well as the anthropology of infrastructure and transnational mobilities with religion. In Malaysia and Singapore, evidence of religion-making and railway-building from a colonial past is visible in multiple modes and media as memories, recollections and 'traces'.

Grounded in multi-generational stories from Kinmen in Taiwan, Visions of Marriage explores the historical entanglements between the pursuit of new personal and national futures. Focusing on the relational and future-making aspects of marriage, the ethnography highlights the intersection of transformations across familial generations and shifting political economies in Taiwan, and more globally. While theories of modernity often treat marriage as an index of social change, without adequate attention to its transformative capacities generated through personal and familial agency, this volume provides comparative insights on family change and demographic shifts in Asia.