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Author:
Sui-Wai Cheung’s study of the institutional history of copper coins in the Ming dynasty reveals how emperors and statesmen perceived and used the copper coins at their disposal. In this process, he uncovers the reality of the Sons of Heaven, showing that although Ming emperors seemed to have unlimited power, they could not afford the upkeep on their palace.

In this revealing history of Ming China, Cheung argues that especially after the breakdown of the household registration system, the aim of the Ming coinage system was to create a new source of income in order to maintain the emperor's domain in Beijing.
A Critical Edition of a Seventeenth-century Volga-Turkī Source
Editor / Translator:
The Book of the Činggis Legend is a product of the steppe’s oral historiography, referring to events from the 13th−17th centuries, and presents the collective historical consciousness of the nomadic peoples of the Volga region's Turco-Tatar world.
The stories offer abundant information on the society, way of thinking and morals of the nomads, one of them can even be regarded as a kind of nomad “mirror of princes”. The other ones incorporate such crucial events in the Volga region as the islamization of nomad clans, epidemic, famine, the appearance of Halley’s Comet, the uprising of the Bashkirs, etc.
This book includes the first critical text edition of the source, the first full translation into English along with a glossary, historical comments, a huge apparatus and the three most complete facsimiles of the manuscript.
A Socio-Cultural History of al-Bīrūnī’s Interpretation of Sāṅkhya and Yoga
Author:
Al-Bīrūnī (ca. 973-1050) was an impressive and innovative encyclopaedist thinker. He is particularly known to have investigated into India of his time. Yet, his life and the circumstances of his encounter with Indian languages, culture and sciences are still shrouded in mystery and legends.

This research brings to light elements of his intellectual journey based on well-grounded analysis so as to contextualise al-Bīrūnī’s work of transmission of Indian philosophies into Arabic. Thanks to a theoretical framework rooted in a multidisciplinary approach, including Translation Studies, it enables to comprehend the full scope of his work and to analyse deeply his motives and choices of interpretation.
To Confine the Surging Tide from the Outside World, 1901–1937
Author:
In this book, Ying Zhou argues that educational reform filled a critical role in bridging the precarious gap between democratic ideals and political realities in late Qing and Republican China, where institutional change in education and the cultivation of a qualified citizenry were two sides of the same coin in the development of democratic education.

Through a multi-level analysis of the (re)arrangements of national education and teachings of citizenship, Zhou unravels the complex political and educational nexus in China between 1901–1937, where the hope of education was to bring both political modernity and social progress.
Zuozhuan (Zuo Tradition) is the foundational text of Chinese historiography and the largest text from preimperial China. For two millennia, its immense complexity has given rise to countless controversies, with scholars debating its nature, time of composition, and historical reliability.
In the present volume—the first of its kind in any Western language—leading scholars of ancient China, Greece, and Rome approach Zuozhuan from multi-faceted perspectives to examine in detail Zuozhuan’s sources, narrative patterns, and meta-narrative devices; analyze the text in dialogue with other ancient Chinese works; and open it to the comparative study with ancient Greek and Roman historiography.
Contributors are: Chen Minzhen, Stephen Durrant, Joachim Gentz, Martin Kern, Wai-yee Li, Nino Luraghi, Ellen O’Gorman, Yuri Pines, David Schaberg, and Kai Vogelsang.
Volume Editor:
This publication brings together current scholarship that focuses on the significance of performing arts heritage of royal courts in Southeast Asia. Royal courts have long been sites for the creation, exchange, maintenance, and development of myriad forms of performing arts and other distinctive cultural expressions. The first volume, Pusaka as Documented Heritage, consists of historical case studies, contexts and developments of royal court traditions, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.