Treatises Of The Supervisor And Guardian Of The Cinnamon Sea

Fan Chengda (1126-1193) was a high-ranking Chinese government official in Guangxi, an experienced traveler, a keen observer, and a gifted writer. His observations on a wide range of subjects are always interesting and revealing, and constitute an important contribution to the literature on Song dynasty China’s frontier peoples. Originally written in direct, unadorned, and allusion-free classical Chinese prose, the complete and annotated English translation of Treatises of the Supervisor and Guardian of the Cinnamon Sea (Guihai yuheng zhi) captures its charm and significance.

Despite its 3,000 kilometre coastline, few people see Vietnam as a maritime country. Here Li Tana presents a powerful new argument about Vietnamese history: that key political changes resulted from the impact, economic and otherwise, of the sea. This is a finely layered account covering the two millennia before colonisation that radically restructures how we understand the role of the maritime and trans-regional in Vietnam's early history. Drawing on exhaustive research of Chinese, Vietnamese and Japanese sources, Li reveals that it is only when viewed against the background of the sea that Vietnam's past can be properly understood. In contrast to traditional perceptions of an inward-looking society dominated by Chinese cultural influence, Vietnam was shaped by dynamic littoral economic and cultural contact.

The Ben cao gang mu, compiled in the second half of the sixteenth century by a team led by the physician Li Shizhen (1518–1593) on the basis of previously published books and contemporary knowledge, is the largest encyclopedia of natural history in a long tradition of Chinese materia medica works. Its description of almost 1,900 pharmaceutically used natural and man-made substances marks the apex of the development of premodern Chinese pharmaceutical knowledge. The Ben cao gang mu dictionary offers access to this impressive work of 1,600,000 characters. This third book in a three-volume series offers detailed biographical data on all identifiable authors, patients, witnesses of therapies, transmitters of recipes, and further persons mentioned in the Ben cao gang mu and provides bibliographical data on all textual sources resorted to and quoted by Li Shizhen and his collaborators.

China's Encounters on the South and Southwest. Reforging the Fiery Frontier Over Two Millennia discusses the mountainous territory between lowland China and Southeast Asia, what we term the Dong world, and varied encounters by China with this world's many elements. The essays describe such encounters over the past two millennia and note various asymmetric relations that have resulted therefrom. Local populations, indigenous chiefs, state officials, and rulers have all acted to shape this frontier, especially after the Mongol incursions of the thirteenth century drastically shifted it. This process has moved from the alliances of the Dong world to the indirect rule of the Tusi (native official) age to the Qing and recent Gaitu Guiliu efforts at direct rule by the state, placing regular officials in charge there. The essays detail the complexities of this frontier through time, space, and personality, particularly in those instances, as today on land and sea, when China elects to pursue an aggressive policy in this direction. Contributors include: Brantly Womack, Kenneth MacLean, Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa, Bradley Davis, Jaymin Kim, Alexander Ong, Joseph Dennis, Sun Laichen, John K. Whitmore, Kathlene Baldanza, Kenneth M. Swope, Michael Brose, James A. Anderson, Liam Kelley, and Catherine Churchman.

The book investigates China’s relations to the outside world between ca. 100 BCE and 1800 CE. In contrast to most histories of the Silk Roads, the focus of this book clearly lies on the maritime Silk Road and on the period between Tang and high Qing, selecting aspects that have so far been neglected in research on the history of China’s relations with the outside world. The author examines, for example, issue of 'imperialism' in imperial China, the specific role of fanbing 蕃兵 (frontier tribal troops) during Song times, the interrelationship between maritime commerce, military expansion, and environmental factors during the Yuan, the question of whether or not early Ming China can be considered a (proto-)colonialist country, the role force and violence played during the Zheng He expeditions, and the significance the Asia-Pacific world possessed for late Ming and early Qing rulers.

Writer, teacher, and adventurer Kurt Caswell has spent his adult life canoeing, hiking, and pedaling his way toward a deeper understanding of our vast and varied world. Getting to Grey Owl: A Man's Journey across Four Continents chronicles over twenty years of Caswell’s travels as he buys a rug in Morocco, rides a riverboat in China, attends a bullfight in Spain, climbs four mountains in the United Kingdom, and backpacks a challenging route through Iceland’s wild Hornstrandir Peninsula. Writing in the tradition of such visionary nomads as Hermann Hesse, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux, Pico Iyer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, Caswell travels through wild and urban landscapes, as well as philosophical and ideological vistas, championing the pleasures of a wandering life. Far from the trappings of the everyday, he explores a range of ideas: the meaning of roads and pathways, the story of Cain and Abel, nomadic life and the evolution of the human animal, the role of agriculture in the making of the modern world, and the fragility of love.

At a time when China-Southeast Asia relationships are undergoing profound changes, it is pleasing to have a volume which examines the interactions between China and the polities and societies to the south through time. With multiple aims of exploring the relations between northern Chinese cultures and those of the south, examining the cultural plurality of areas which are today parts of Southern China, and illuminating the relations between Sinitic and non-Sinitic societies, the volume is broad in concept and content. Within these extensive rubrics, this edited collection further interrogates the nature of Asian polities and their historiography, the constitution of Chineseness, imperial China's southern expansions, cultural hybridity, economic relations, regional systems and ethnic interactions across East Asia. The editors Victor H. Mair and Liam C. Kelley are to be congratulated for bringing together such a wealth of contributions offering nascent interpretations and broad overviews, set within the overarching historical and contemporary contexts provided through Wang Gungwu's introduction.- Dr Geoffrey Wade, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University

A Cultural History of Plants in the Post-Classical Era covers the period from 500 to 1400, ranging across northern and central Europe to the Mediterranean, and from the Byzantine and Arabic Empires to the Persian World, India, and China. This was an age of empires and fluctuating borders, presenting a changing mosaic of environments, populations, and cultural practices. Many of the ancient uses and meanings of plants were preserved, but these were overlaid with new developments in agriculture, landscapes, medicine, eating habits, and art. The six-volume set of the Cultural History of Plants presents the first comprehensive history of the uses and meanings of plants from prehistory to today. The themes covered in each volume are plants as staple foods; plants as luxury foods; trade and exploration; plant technology and science; plants and medicine; plants in culture; plants as natural ornaments; the representation of plants. Alain Touwaide is Scientific Director at the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions, Washington, D.C., USA. A Cultural History of Plants in the Post-Classical Era is the second volume in the six-volume set, A Cultural History of Plants, also available online as part of Bloomsbury Cultural History, a fully-searchable digital library (see www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com). General Editors: Annette Giesecke, University of Delaware, USA, and David Mabberley, University of Oxford, UK.