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This series features research monographs, edited volumes, and translated works that advance understanding of societies in East Asia or of their interaction or comparison with those in other parts of the world. It seeks to go beyond traditional paradigms and notions and presents possibilities for new discourses. The modern era is broadly defined in this series as the period roughly from the fifteenth century onwards. The series welcomes discipline-specific, interdisciplinary, and comparative studies in humanities and social sciences that investigate various aspects of culture and society in the region as well as studies of global historical processes with specific reference to the region.

Authors are cordially invited to submit proposals and/or full manuscripts to the publisher at BRILL, Stephanie Carta and Masja Horn.

Please see our Guidelines for a Book Proposal. All submissions are subject to a double-anonymous peer review process prior to publication.
Editors: and
In this volume, leading scholars of early Chinese literature offer new, multi-faceted research on the ancient anthology Lyrics of Chu (Chuci). Through meticulous textual analysis, richly annotated translations, and theoretical reflection, they challenge millennia-old assumptions about China’s arch-poet Qu Yuan (ca. 300 BCE), his authorship, and the composition of the lyrics attributed to him, above all the “Li sao” (Encountering Sorrow), ancient China’s grandest poem. Thoroughly original insights into the poetics and aesthetics of Chuci poetry reopen these resplendent lyrics to a fresh appraisal of their captivating qualities and their foundational significance for the Chinese literary tradition.
Contributors are: Lucas Rambo Bender, Heng Du, Michael Hunter, Martin Kern, Paul W. Kroll, Stephen Owen.
In early modern Japan, upper status groups coveted pills and powders made of exotic foreign ingredients such as mummy and rhinoceros horn. By the early twentieth century, over-the-counter-patent medicines, and, more alarmingly, morphine, had become mass commodities, fueling debates over opiates in Japan’s expanding imperial territories.
The fall of the empire and the occupation of Japan by the United States created conditions favorable for heroin use, followed, in time, by glue sniffing and psychedelic mushroom ingestion.
By illuminating the neglected history of drugs, this volume highlights both the transnational embeddedness and national peculiarities of the “politics of consumption” in Japan.
Contributors are: Anna Andreeva, Oleg Benesch, William G. Clarence-Smith, Hung Bin Hsu, John Jennings, Miriam Kingsberg Kadia, William Marotti, Kōji Ozaki, Jonas Rüegg, Jesús Solís, Christopher W.A. Szpilman, Judith Vitale, and Timothy Yang.
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.
Volume 3: Fozu tongji, juan 43-48: The Song Dynasty
Author:
The Fozu tongji by Zhipan (ca. 1220–1275) is a key text of Chinese Buddhist historiography. The core of the work is formed by the “Fayun tongsai zhi,” an annalistic history of Buddhism in China, which extends through Fozu tongji, juan 34–48.
Thomas Jülch now presents a translation of the “Fayun tongsai zhi” in three volumes. This third volume covers the annalistic display concerning the Song dynasty.
Offering elaborate annotations, Jülch succeeds in clarifying the backgrounds to the historiographic contents, which Zhipan presents in highly essentialized style. Regarding the historical matters addressed in the material translated for the present volume, the Fozu tongji is often the earliest source. In several cases, inaccuracies in Zhipan’s account can however still be discerned, and Jülch succeeds in employing other sources to reveal and correct those errors.
The Dagregisters Kept by the Chiefs of the Dutch East India Company Factory in Nagasaki, Japan.
The present volume of The Deshima Diaries consists of the journals that were kept by the chiefs of the Dutch trading post in Japan during the first two decades of the so called seclusion period (1640-1868). The employees of the Dutch East India Company – from 1640 the only Europeans in Japan - had to give up their relatively free life in the port of Hirado and were forced to move to the tiny island of Deshima in the Bay of Nagasaki. Continually surrounded by Japanese guards, spies, cooks, concubines and interpreters they were eager to continue their trading activities with their Japanese hosts. Every year, with a few exceptions, the chief of the factory and two or three staff members travelled to Edo to pay obeisance to the Shogun. The diaries in this volume describe in detail how the Dutch merchants grappled with the severe restrictions that were imposed on them, but their writings also shed surprising light on social and economic life in Nagasaki and beyond.

Author:
In the early twentieth century, the first large batch of Chinese civil engineers had graduated from the USA, and together with their American senior colleagues returned to China. They were enthusiastic about reconstructing the young republic by building new railways, highways, and canals, but what the engineers experienced in China, including mismanaged railways, useless highways, and silted canals, did not always meet their expectations and ideals. In this book, Thorben Pelzer makes the stories of these Chinese and American engineers come to life through exploring previously unpublished letters, rare images, maps, and a rich biographical dataset. He argues that the experiences of these engineers include a myriad of contradictions, disillusionment, and discontent, keeping the engineering profession in a constant flux of searching for its meaning and its place in Republican China.