In this exciting book, Ronald Suleski introduces daily life for the common people of China in the century from 1850 to 1950. They were semi-literate, yet they have left us written accounts of their hopes, fears, and values. They have left us the hand-written manuscripts (chaoben 抄本) now flooding the antiques markets in China. These documents represent a new and heretofore overlooked category of historical sources. Suleski gives a detailed explanation of the interaction of chaoben with the lives of the people. He offers examples of why they were so important to the poor laboring masses: people wanted horoscopes predicting their future, information about the ghosts causing them headaches, a few written words to help them trade in the rural markets, and many more examples are given. The book contains a special appendix giving the first complete translation into English of a chaoben describing the ghosts and goblins that bedeviled the poor working classes.

Rats, Cats, Rogues, and Heroes reveals China's history and culture through the eyes of ordinary men and women using an interdisciplinary perspective that incorporates history, anthropology, folk studies, and literature to examine the sociocultural and symbolic worlds of gangsters, sorcerers, and prostitutes in late imperial and modern China.

From 1931 to 1945, as Japanese imperialism spread throughout China, three distinct regions experienced life under occupation: Manchukuo, East China, and North China. Yet despite the enduring importance of the occupation to world history and historical memory in East Asia, Translating the Occupation is the first English-language volume to make available key sources from this period to both scholars and students. Contributors have translated texts from Chinese, Japanese, and Korean on a wide range of subjects. Each is accompanied by a short essay to contextualize the translation and explain its significance. This volume offers a practical, accessible sourcebook from which to challenge standard narratives. The texts have been selected to deepen our understanding of the myriad tensions, transformations, and continuities in Chinese wartime society. Translating the Occupation reasserts the centrality of the occupation to twentieth-century Chinese history, opening the door further to much-needed analysis.

A groundbreaking history of fengshui’s roles in public life and law during China’s last imperial dynasty Today the term fengshui, which literally means “wind and water,” is recognized around the world. Yet few know exactly what it means, let alone its fascinating history. In Laws of the Land, Tristan Brown tells the story of the important roles—especially legal ones—played by fengshui in Chinese society during China’s last imperial dynasty, the Manchu Qing (1644–1912). Employing archives from Mainland China and Taiwan that have only recently become available, this is the first book to document fengshui’s invocations in Chinese law during the Qing dynasty. Facing a growing population, dwindling natural resources, and an overburdened rural government, judicial administrators across China grappled with disputes and petitions about fengshui in their efforts to sustain forestry, farming, mining, and city planning. Laws of the Land offers a radically new interpretation of these legal arrangements: they worked. An intelligent, considered, and sustained engagement with fengshui on the ground helped the imperial state keep the peace and maintain its legitimacy, especially during the increasingly turbulent decades of the nineteenth century. As the century came to an end, contentious debates over industrialization swept across the bureaucracy, with fengshui invoked by officials and scholars opposed to the establishment of railways, telegraphs, and foreign-owned mines. Demonstrating that the only way to understand those debates and their profound stakes is to grasp fengshui’s longstanding roles in Chinese public life, Laws of the Land rethinks key issues in the history of Chinese law, politics, science, religion, and economics.

How did lay people in old China save their lives when dealing with acute or chronic health issues? Conventional medicine was costly and might not have been an option for many. Instead, people in villages and towns relied on remedies drawn from a woodblock-printed illustrated booklet called the Seventy-Two Therapies, first published in 1847. The goal of this book is to foster an appreciation of China’s long tradition of folk remedies. Each folk remedy is illustrated by a page from the circa 1860s woodblock edition of the Seventy-Two Therapieswhich the author used for translation. He also added a historical and interpretive analysis to expand on each therapy and to place it in the context of contemporary thinking, aiming at academics and readers interested in the everyday lives of common people in pre-1950 China, and in the folk medicine wisdom inherited from the past. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “The 72 specific diseases identified intimate a vast, unexplored world. Professor Suleski’s translation and commentary calls our attention to a work that now compels us to expand our horizons.” —Shigehisa Kuriyama (Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University) “This book captures the fascinating depth and ingenuity in Chinese folk medicine that should still resonate with many readers today. Professor Suleski shows us how empathy and rigor, neither condescending nor mystifying, can shed so much light on the resourceful remedies and arresting imageries employed by past healers to make sense of human suffering and dignity.” —He Bian (Department of History, Princeton University) “In this riveting book, Suleski presents us with a rare glimpse of the kaleidoscopic and curious world of folk remedies in traditional China that has been hitherto overlooked by historians of medicine. Written with enthusiasm and accessible to a general audience, 72 Ways of Saving Lives offers valuable insight into healing practice among ordinary people that is both unconventional in history and rlevant to us today.” —Yan Liu (Department of History, University at Buffalo, SUNY)

Spanning the century from the Taiping Rebellion through the establishment of the People's Republic of China, this is the first comprehensive history of women in modern China. Its scope is broad, encompassing political, economic, military, and cultural history, and drawing upon Chinese and Japanese sources untapped by Western scholars. The book presents new information on a wide range of topics: the impact of Western ideas on women, especially in education; the importance of women in the labor force; the relative independence enjoyed by some women textile workers; the struggle against footbinding; the influence of anarchism; the participation of a women's brigade in the Revolution of 1911; the role of women in the May Fourth Movement; the differences between the more assertive women of South China and the 'traditional' women of the North in organizing for political action; the involvement of peasant women in insurgency and anti-Japanese struggles in the countryside; and the effects of the Marriage Law of 1950. The author has contributed a new preface to this English edition, and Joshua A. Fogel and Susan Mann have written an introduction that places the book in the context of studies of Chinese women, Japanese sinology, and women's history in general. The book has extensive notes, a bibliography, and, as an appendix, a chronology of the history of women in modern China.

A fascinating journey through 100 years of Chinese history, beginning with the historic Treaty of Nanking and ending with Mao Tse-tung’s creation of the Chinese People’s Republic, by the the acclaimed New Yorker correspondent who lived in China from 1935 to 1941 For centuries, China’s code of behavior was incomprehensible to Westerners whom the Chinese viewed as irredeemable barbarians. Presenting historical events with an immediacy that makes you feel as if you were there, Hahn takes readers through isolationist China’s difficult and often costly adaptations to the invasions of Western “foreign devils”, —from the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, which gave the West access to five 5 of China’s eastern ports, to the British colonization of Hong Kong, the rise of the tea trade, the Opium Wars, the arrival of Christian missionaries, and the Boxer Rebellion. Hahn also illuminates the revolutionary movement led by Sun Yat-sen, the overthrow of the Ch’ing Dynasty, the escalating tensions between the Communist and Nationalist parties, and the Japanese invasion on the eve of World War II—which Hahn witnessed firsthand. The final chapters cover the civil war, which ended with Chairman Mao’s formation of the People’s Republic of China and Chiang Kai-shek’s retreat to Taiwan. With an insider’s knowledge of Chinese culture and the politics, Hahn delivers a sharply observant book that illuminates an unforgettable era in China’s tumultuous past.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1985.

Chinese history is brought to vivid life by the “quintessential New Yorker narrator” and author of The Soong Sisters, who lived in China from 1935 to 1941 (The New York Times). Chiang Kai-Shek: As the head of the Nationalist Party, Chiang led the Republic of China for over two decades from 1927 through the Japanese invasion, World War II, and the civil war that ended with a Communist victory in 1949. After defeat, he retreated with his government to Taiwan, where he continued to lead as president of the exiled Republic of China. Published in 1955, this in-depth biography by legendary New Yorker writer Emily Hahn examines Chiang’s childhood in southern China, his relationship with revolutionary Sun Yat-Sen, his rise to power, and his battles with the Japanese Imperial Army and Communist forces led by Mao Zedong, as well as chronicling his marriage to the glamorous, American-educated Soong May-ling (the youngest of the influential siblings portrayed in Hahn’s The Soong Sisters), who converted her husband to Christianity and helped him enact social reforms. Casting a critical eye on Sino-American relations, Hahn sheds new light on a complex leader, who was one of the most important global political figures of the last century. “[Hahn] writes . . . with an impassioned warmth . . . colorful reading . . . An irreparable past is echoed in the forlorn note sounded here.” —Kirkus Reviews China Only Yesterday, 1850–1950: With an insider’s knowledge of Chinese culture and politics, Hahn delivers a sharply observant book that illuminates a century of China’s tumultuous history. Her “absorbing” history begins with the Treaty of Nanking, which gave Western powers access to five of China’s eastern ports, and covers the British colonization of Hong Kong, the rise of the tea trade, the Opium Wars, the arrival of Christian missionaries, the Boxer Rebellion, the revolutionary movement led by Sun Yat-Sen, the overthrow of the Ch’ing Dynasty, the escalating tensions between the Communist and Nationalist parties, and the Japanese invasion on the eve of World War II—which Hahn experienced firsthand (Kirkus Reviews). The final chapters cover the civil war, which ended with Chairman Mao’s formation of the People’s Republic of China and Chiang Kai-shek’s retreat to Taiwan. “[An] observant, satisfying book.” —Kirkus Reviews

"The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in China deftly examines the Bible's translation, expression, interpretation, and reception in China. Forty-eight essays address the translation of the Bible into China's languages and dialects; expression of the Bible in Chinese literary and religious contexts; Chinese biblical interpretations and methods of reading; and the reception of the Bible in the institutions and arts of China. This comprehensive and unique volume presents insightful, succinct, and provocative evidence about and interpretations of encounters between the Bible and China for centuries past, continuing into the present, and likely prospects for the future"--