Books published by Harvard University, Asia Center

How have conceptions and practices of sovereignty shaped how Chineseness is imagined? This ethnography addresses this question through the example of Macau, a southern Chinese city that was a Portuguese colony from the 1550s until 1999.

Bianco focuses on "spontaneous" rural unrest, uninfluenced by revolutionary intellectuals. The author shows that predominant forms of protest were directed not against the landowning class but against state agents, and suggests that 20th-century Chinese peasants were less different from 17th- or 18th-century French peasants than might be imagined.

Liu Yuan's Lingyan ge, a woodblock-printed book from 1669, re-creates a portrait gallery that memorialized 24 vassals of the early Tang court. This study examines the dialogues created among the texts and images in Lingyan ge from multiple perspectives.

Though dismissed as a poet following his death, Tao Yuanming (365?-427) is now considered one of China's greatest writers. This study of the posthumous reputation of a central figure in Chinese literary history illuminates the transformation of literature and culture in premodern China.

The literary career of Uchida Hyakken (1889-1971) encompassed a wide variety of styles and genres. This book takes up Hyakken's fiction and essays written during Japan's prewar years to investigate the intersection of his literature with the material and discursive surroundings of the time.

Anderson argues that shifts in the gender system during the early Meiji period had mixed consequences for Japanese women. Women gained access to the chance to represent themselves and play a limited political role, but were permitted political participation only as an expression of "citizenship through the household."

This book explores three discharged Ming officials in the sixteenth century-Wang Jiusi, Kang Hai, and Li Kaixian-who turned to literary endeavors when forced to retire. As their efforts reveal, a disappointing end to an official career and a physical move away from the center led to their embrace and pursuit of a marginalized literary genre, qu.

This book uses Song China to explain how a pre-industrial regime organized itself spatially in order to exercise authority. By detailing the relationship between the court and local administration, Mostern complicates the received paradigm of Song centralization and decentralization.

This biography casts new light on the life and career of Admiral Nomura Kichisaburo. Connecting his experiences as a naval officer to his service as foreign minister and ambassador, Mauch reassesses Nomura's contributions as a hard-nosed realist whose grasp of the underlying realities of Japanese-U.S. relations went largely unappreciated.

Following the end of WWII in Asia, the Allied powers repatriated over six million Japanese nationals from colonies and battlefields throughout Asia. This title analyzes how the human remnants of empire served as sites of negotiation in the process of the jettisoning of the colonial project and in the creation of the national identities in Japan.

Relations between China and the United States have been of central importance to both countries over the past half-century, as well as to all states affected by that relationship. The eight chapters in this volume offer the first multinational, multi-archival review of the history of Chinese-American conflict and cooperation in the 1970s.

De Weerdt examines how occupational, political, and intellectual groups shaped curricular standards and examination criteria during the Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279), and how these standards in turn shaped political and intellectual agendas. This book reframes the debate over the civil service examinations and their place in the imperial order.

Japan has long wrestled with the memories of World War II. Franziska Seraphim traces the activism of five civic organizations to examine the ways in which diverse organized memories have secured legitimate niches within the public sphere.

Forty lessons introducing students to the basic patterns and structures of Classical Chinese are taken from a number of pre-Han and Han texts selected to give students a grounding in exemplary Classical Chinese style. Two additional lessons use texts from later periods to help students appreciate the changes in written Chinese over the centuries.

Scholars have noted the role of China's demand for silver in the emergence of the modern world. This book discusses the interaction of this demand and the early-19th-century Latin American independence movements, changes in the world economy, the resulting disruptions in the Qing dynasty, and the transformation from the High Qing to modern China.

In Seeing Stars, Dennis J. Frost traces the emergence and evolution of sports celebrity in Japan from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries. Frost explores how various constituencies have repeatedly molded and deployed representations of individual athletes, revealing that sports stars are socially constructed phenomena.

Emperor Taizong (r. 626-49) of the Tang is remembered as an exemplary ruler. This study addresses that aura of virtuous sovereignty and Taizong's construction of a reputation for moral rulership through his own literary writings-with particular attention to his poetry.

In this study, the author contends that early Chinese ancestor worship was not merely mechanical and thoughtless. Rather, it was an idea system that aroused serious debates about the nature of postmortem existence, served as the religious backbone to Confucianism, and may even have been the forerunner of Daoist and Buddhist meditation practices.

Underlying Nanjing's 1930s policies was a concern for the capital's image-offensive people were allowed to exist as long as they remained invisible. Lipkin exposes the process of social engineering and the ways in which the suppressed reacted to their abuse; he puts the poor at the center of the picture, defying efforts to make them invisible.

Roth explores the role of traditions in the institutional development of the noh theater from the 14th century-late 20th century. He focuses on the development of key traditions that constitute the "ethos of noh," the ideology that empowered certain groups of actors at the expense of others, and how this ethos fostered noh's professionalization.

The incorporation of Taiwan into the Qing empire in the 17th century and its evolution into a province by the late 19th century involved not only a reconsideration of imperial geography but also a reconceptualization of the Chinese domain. Here, Teng takes the view of Taiwan-China relations as a product of the history of Qing expansionism.

Here is the first real comparison of the civil governments of two traditional East Asian societies on an institution-by-institution basis. Woodside examines in detail the surviving statutes of both societies in his political and cultural study, a pioneering venture in East Asian comparative history.

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 inaugurated a period of great change in Japan; it is seldom associated, however, with advances in civil and political rights. By studying parliamentarianism-the theories, arguments, and polemics marshaled in support of a representative system of government-Kim uncovers a much more complicated picture of this era.

Since 1979 China's leaders have introduced reforms that have lessened the state's hold over the lives of ordinary citizens. By examining the growth in individual rights, the public sphere, democratic processes, and pluralization, Ogden seeks to answer questions concerning the relevance of liberal democratic ideas for China.