The remains of Tai Fu's lost collection Kuang-i chi ("The Great Book of Marvels") preserve three hundred short tales of encounters with the other world. Through the eyes of an official, the picture emerges of a complex lay society, served by a mixed priesthood of ritual practitioners. This study develops a style of close reading through which the tales give access to the lives of individuals in eighth-century China, a society embarking on fundamental change.

The study traces the economic and demographic history of a corner of China's southeast coast from the third to the thirteenth centuries, looking at the relationship between changes in the agrarian and urban economies of the area and their connections to the expanding role of domestic and foreign trade. It provides a previously unexplored perspective on the role of commercialized production and trade in a regional economy in the premodern era and demonstrates that trade was able to drive change in a premodern economy in a way that has not generally been recognized.

These notes, based on lectures given at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, provide an introduction to the theory of von Neumann algebras.

Much scholarly work has been published on the Chinese medieval 'aristocracy', in Chinese, Japanese and Western languages. It is commonly accepted that the change from an aristocratic society to a 'meritocracy' was one of the turning points of Chinese history. But since almost every aspect of political, economic and cultural history is involved in questions of the nature of the aristocracy, perhaps the only way to test theories of the means by which a small elite preserved its social status and political prestige for seven or eight hundred years is by tracing the fortunes of a single family in...

Poetry and Politics is the first full-length study in any language of the life and works of the Chinese poet and thinker, Juan Chi (AD 210 263). This book contains translations of all Juan Chi's important works, in verse and prose, his letters and all the historical accounts of his life. The reader is thus enabled, for the first time in a work of this kind, to see a Chinese writer in the round, in his works and in his setting. Juan Chi's attachment to traditional Confucian values kept him in the centre of political and social life, but eventually his disgust with the disloyalty and...

This book provides an analysis of changes in the level and structure of wages in China from the 1920s to 1972. In the first part of the study Dr Howe uses this analysis as a starting point to evaluate the degree to which wage policy objectives have been achieved, particularly since 1949. The author explains both fluctuations in policy and discrepancies between plans and reality and examines the mechanisms of wage determination. In so doing, he makes it clear that even in a highly planned society there are some limits to what is possible in the regulation of wages and incomes. He goes on to...

A study of the early versions of the classic Chinese novel known to readers in English as Monkey. Dr Dudbridge examines a long tradition of earlier versions in narrative and dramatic form through which the great episodic cycle slowly took shape. The two main fields of interest are popular culture and folklore and the development of Chinese vernacular literature. Dr Dudbridge provides a very thorough survey of present knowledge about the whole topic and discusses critically a good deal of theorising about it. This is a study for experts. It uses Chinese characters, both in text pages and in...

This is a study of landholding, taxation and social structure in one county of central China that became famous in the Ming and Ch'ing periods for producing great officials and remarkable intellectual traditions. The primary aim of the author is to investigate the composition, organisation and economic basis of the local elite, in particular the role played by large kinship groups and among her sources are local gazetteers and lineage genealogies. The importance of the book is that it looks at the elite in a local context, rather than focusing on the national elite of top degree-holders and...

This is a comprehensive and fully documented study of Chinese bureaucracy during the Han period, when many of the basic lines of Chinese government practice were laid down. It is also more detailed and wider in scope than similar works on other periods of Chinese history. The book covers the time from 202 BC to AD 9 and from AD 25 to 189, analysing and describing the central and local administrations, the army, official salaries, civil service recruitment and power in government. Professor Bielenstein translates all Chinese official titles and includes alphabetical lists of these titles with...

All the works of the Chinese poet T'ao Yuan-ming (AD 365 427) generally considered genuine have been translated here with commentary and annotation. T'ao, in the author's opinion, is of all the major Chinese poets especially concerned with personal integrity and the meaning of man's life. His poetry for this reason may be able to transcend the barriers of cultural difference. For centuries of Chinese readers, however, the image of T'ao Yuan-ming as an eccentric wine-loving recluse who embraced purity and simplicity and rejected the corruption of political society has virtually been as...