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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.
Administrative Documents Excavated at Zoumalou, Hunan
Authors: , , and
In 1996 archaeologists excavated over 70,000 inscribed pieces of wood from a well in Changsha, the largest such discovery ever made in China. They are local administrative records of the state of Wu in the 230s and provide remarkable detail on the society, governance, and economy of third century central China.
Although Wu was one of the famous Three Kingdoms, its administrative history was poorly known until these documents were found, so we have written this book to explain the context and content of these document to help researchers use these valuable texts to rewrite the history of South China.
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Thorben Pelzer makes the stories of these Chinese and American engineers come to life through exploring previously unpublished letters, rare images, maps, and a rich biographical dataset.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.
The book investigates China’s relations to the outside world between ca. 100 BCE and 1800 AD. 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, the power alliance between the Tang and the Arabs during Tang times, 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 what role of the Asia-Pacific world played for late Ming and early Qing rulers.
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The introduction of writing enables new forms of literature, but these can be invisible in works that survive as manuscripts. Through looking at inscriptions of poetry on garbage and as graffiti, we can glimpse how literature spread along with writing.
This study uses these lesser-studied sources, including inscriptions on pottery, architecture, and especially wooden tablets known as mokkan, to uncover how poetry, and literature more broadly, was used, shared and thrown away in early Japan. Through looking at these disposable and informal sources, we explore the development of early Japanese literature, and even propose parallels to similar developments in other societies across space and time.
The Construction of the Feminine Voice in Early Medieval Chinese Literature
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This book studies the formation of the male-constructed conventional voice of women in Chinese literature from the 3rd to 6th century.
It highlights specific moments during which the feminine voice became recognized, accepted, and stabilized, including the shift of focus from the performative to the textual in female representations; the formation of a male literary community; the popularity of romanticized historical narratives; and the emerging sense of literary history.
This study emphasizes the historicity of the feminine voice and strives to question and challenge established notions about textual stability, authorship, the literary canon, and literary history.
Volume Editor:
The establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 heralded dramatic changes in Chinese cultural practices. This volume, the latest entry in the Historical Studies of Contemporary China series, includes 11 articles translated from Historical Studies of Contemporary China (Dangdai Zhongguo shi yanjiu), one of China’s leading academic journals.

The broad range of cultural forms covered include the book trade and publishing industry, comic strips, literacy and education, popular visual art, Peking Opera, and rural temple fairs. This volume introduces readers to cutting edge Chinese language scholarship and a vibrant cultural scene as it transitioned to the era of the People’s Republic, tracing the continuities as well as the changes in cultural life in China throughout the 20th century.