Books published by Harvard University, Asia Center

A reference work from one of the world's preeminent linguists, A Comprehensive Manchu-English Dictionary substantially enlarges and revises Jerry Norman's 1978 Concise Manchu-English Lexicon. With hundreds of new entries and a new introduction on pronunciation and script, it will become the standard English-language resource on the Manchu language.

During the Song dynasty (960-1278), some of China's elite found an elegant and subtle means of dissent: landscape painting. By examining literary archetypes, painting titles, contemporary inscriptions, and the historical context, Murck shows that certain paintings expressed strong political opinions-some transparent, others deliberately concealed.

Includes chapters which treat men as well as women, theories of sexuality as well as gender prescriptions, and same-sex as well as heterosexual relations. This book examines how Japanese have (en) gendered their ideas, institutions, and society.

A house is a site, the bounds and focus of a community. It is also an artifact, a material extension of its occupants' lives. This book takes the Japanese house in both senses, as site and as artifact, and explores the spaces, commodities, and conceptions of community associated with it in the modern era.

The first book of its kind in any Western language, Wang Anshi and Song Poetic Culture brings into focus a cluster of issues that are central to the understanding of both the poet and his cultural milieu. Together, the chapters form a varied mosaic of Wang Anshi's work and its critical reception in the larger context of Song poetic culture.

A groundbreaking study of prison religion, Karma and Punishment introduces a form of chaplaincy rooted in the Buddhist concept of doctrinal admonition. Through research and fieldwork, Adam Lyons uncovers a dimension of Buddhist modernism that developed as Japan's religious organizations carved out a niche as defenders of society by fighting crime.

Grace C. Huang reconsiders Chiang Kai-shek's leadership and legacy in an intriguing new portrait of this twentieth-century leader. Comparing his response to imperialism to those of Mao, Yuan Shikai, and Mahatma Gandhi, Huang widens the implications of her findings to explore alternatives to Western expressions of nationalism and modernity.

This work provides a history of the Rinzai Zen monastic institution in Medieval Japan.

The political fragmentation and constant warfare of medieval Japan did not necessarily inhibit economic growth. Rather, as this book shows, these conditions created opportunities for a wider spectrum of society to participate in trade, markets, and monetization, laying the groundwork for Japan's transformation into an early modern society.

The central argument of this study of the development of a communications network linking the far-flung parts of the Japanese imperium is that modern telecommunications not only served to connect these territories but, more important, made it possible for the Japanese to envision an integrated empire in Asia.

Earthquake Children is the first book to examine the origins of modern Japan's infrastructure of resilience. Janet Borland vividly demonstrates that Japan's contemporary culture of disaster preparedness-and its people's ability to respond calmly in times of emergency-are the results of learned and practiced behaviors inspired by earlier tragedies.

In Wings for the Rising Sun, scholar and former airline pilot Jurgen Melzer tells the history of Japanese aviation as a story of international cooperation, competition, and conflict. He details how Japan absorbed technologies from abroad, fostered public enthusiasm for aviation at home, and eventually crafted boldly original flying machines.

Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting chronicles the life of a modern art form. In the late 1910s Chinese painters began working outdoors. They also adopted linear perspective and Cartesian optics. Yi Gu reflects on the complex interaction of local and Western aesthetics within the new form and on the nature of visual modernity in China.

With the ascension of a new emperor and the dawn of the Reiwa Era, Kenneth J. Ruoff expands upon and updates The People's Emperor, his study of the monarchy's role as a political, societal, and cultural institution in contemporary Japan.

Adam Kern offers a close reading of the vibrant popular imagination through kibyoshi, a genre of sophisticated pictorial fiction from late-eighteenth-century Japan. Illustrated with rare prints from Japanese archival collections, these entertaining works will appeal to the general reader as well as to the student of Japanese cultural history.

Regional Literature and the Transmission of Culture provides a textured picture of cultural transmission in the Qing and early Republican eras. Study of drum ballads opens up new perspectives in Chinese literature and history and offers a new paradigm that will interest scholars of cultural history, literature, legal history, and popular culture.

In this groundbreaking study, Maram Epstein identifies filial piety as the dominant expression of love in Qing dynasty texts. By decentering romantic feeling as the dominant expression of love during the High Qing, Orthodox Passions calls for a new understanding of the affective landscape of late imperial China.

Feeling the Past in Seventeenth-Century China highlights the central role played by the body in writers' memories during the Ming-Qing cataclysm. Sight, sound, taste, and touch configured ordinary experiences next to traumatic events. This embodied experience reveals literature's mission of remembrance as a moral endeavor in cultural continuity.

Through research into Daoist ritual in history and as it survives today, Andersen shows that the concept of truth in Chinese Daoist philosophy and ritual posits being as a paradox anchored in the inexistent Way, and consists in seeking to be an exception to ordinary norms and rules of behavior which nonetheless engages what is common to us all.

Based on the author's thesis, issued under the title: Subaltern speak: imperial multiplicities in Japan's empire and post-war colonialisms ( Ph. D.--University of California, Santa Barbara, 2011).

This book examines the evolution of Daoist beliefs about human liability and redemption over eight centuries and outlines ritual procedures for rescuing an ill-starred destiny, focusing on the Daoist vocabulary of bondage and redemption, the changing meanings of sacrifice, and metaphoric conceptualizations bridging the visible and invisible realms.

Drawing on vernacular Vietnamese and classical Chinese sources, Ang identifies the different ways two leading statesmen of the time employed literature to transform the frontier region. This book captures a historical moment of overlapping visions, frustrated schemes, and contested desires on the Mekong plains.

"For over a century, voting has been a surprisingly common political activity in China. This book re-examines China's experiments with elections from the perspective of intellectual and cultural history"--Provided by publisher.

Part colonial urban social history, part exploration of the relationship between modern ethnicity and nationalism, Becoming Taiwanese examines the important first era in the history of Taiwanese identity construction during the early twentieth century in the northern port city of Jilong (Keelung).

Ethnic Chrysalis is the first book in English to cover the early modern history of the Orochen, an ethnic group that has for centuries inhabited areas now belonging to the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China. Kim examines how the impact of political organization in one era can endure in a group's social and cultural values.