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When Marshal Hong breaks the seals which generations of Taoist Masters have placed on the temple doors to hold back 108 incarcerated Demon Princes, powerful forces of disorder are released. One after another, brave men fall out with officialdom and are obliged to join the brotherhood of the rivers and lakes-the mixed company of heroes and vagabonds who live by their wits and their fighting skills. The story of The Broken Seals branches this way and that, following first one hero, then another, as their paths converge and part, until finally 108 brave-but not entirely admirable-men are united at the outlaws' stronghold in the Marshes of Mount Liang.The story takes us through the vast landscape of imperial China. We hear of epic duels, gargantuan feasts, and cunning ambushes, and we witness injustice, betrayal, murder and revenge. We are told also of the beauty of the moon during Mid-Autumn Festival or of the snow, crisp underfoot on a stormy night in the country.This volume consists of the first twenty-two chapters of the full 120-chapter version of the classic Chinese novel by Shi Nai'an and Luo Guanzhong. It is the first English translation based on this version and including much of the verse. It offers the English reader something of the liveliness and humour of a work which has delighted generations of Chinese readers.

The JINTIAN series of contemporary literature features new and innovative writing from mainland China and abroad. Titles in the series are edited by Bei Dao, Lydia H. Liu, and Christopher Mattison. A collaborative venture between Zephyr Press, the Jintian Literary Foundation, and The Chinese University Press, each bilingual title highlights the ever?changing literary culture of China while simultaneously expanding the English language with a wave of new voices in translation.

Zhou Zuoren (1885-1967) is one of the most controversial modern Chinese intellectuals and the brother of the writer Lu Xun. Zhou was radically at odds with many of his contemporaries and opposed the normative national subject of most May Fourth reformers. His work was banned in both mainland China and Taiwan for many years because of his collaboration with the Japanese puppet government during the Sino-Japanese War. Zhou's essays present an alternative vision of the nation, question the dichotomy between modernity and traditions, and espouse a literary style that values openness and individualism. The book has tilted the balance more in favour of the fractious kind than the typically affable and unworldly ones, and is thus a unique selection of Zhou's essays.

This is one of the famous dramas by Lao She. The drama is set in a typical, old Beijing teahouse and follows the lives of the owner and his customers through three stages in modern Chinese history. The play spans fifty years and has a cast of over sixty characters drawn from all levels of society. Brought together in Yutai Teahouse, they reflect the changes that were taking place in Chinese society. The strength and appeal of the play lie in part in Lao She's masterful recreation of the characters and language of the streets of old Beijing, but the center of its strength is Lao She's vision, his unerring choice of significant detail, and his familiarity with the old society he is describing, with its strengths, weaknesses, and ironies. It is this which carries Teahouse beyond the borders of social criticism and makes it a complex and living work of art. Written in 1957, Teahouse bids an inspired, lingering farewell to old Beijing and the old society, despite their evils and ills, and extends a passionate welcome to the new society with its promise of freedom and equality of the people. Standing as it does between old and new China, and deeply rooted in both, Teahouse shimmers with a fine sense of ambivalence. True to its writer, to China, and to its time, it is a masterpiece of modern theater.

The Tiger Killers is the second volume of a new translation of the Chinese classical novel generally known as ""The Water Margin"". Like the first volume, ""The Broken Seals"", it follows the fortunes of various outlaw heroes as they move through a world of treacherous officials, jealous toadies, bullying gaolers, hired assassins, foolhardy generals and cannibalistic innkeepers. This volume contains some of the most famous scenes in the novel, starting with the episode in which Wu Song gets drunk at the tavern, ascends the pass in late evening and kills a notorious man-eating tiger with his bare hands. His subsequent encounter with his midget brother's flirtatious wife, Jinlian or Golden Lotus, and her vain attempt to seduce him lead into a tale of adultery, callous murder and bloody vengeance. The second half of the book is concerned with Song Jiang's attempts to serve out his prison sentence honorably and avoid becoming an outlaw, until he is unjustly condemned to death for a misconstrued poem. Towards the end of this volume we meet the violent Li Kui, variously known as Iron Ox or Black Whirlwind, who also turns out to have a way with tigers. This volume consists of chapters 23 to 43 of the full 120-chapter version of the novel by Shi Nai'an and Luo Guanzhong. It is the first English translation based on this version.

The Scattered Flock, the last volume of this new series of translations, contains chapters 91-120 that mark the disastrous end of the 108 heroes. The action in this volume can be divided into three parts: the campaign against Tian Hu, the campaign against Wang Qing and the campaign against Fang La. It is in the last of these that the heroes of Mount Liang begin to die. Their demise is as haphazard and casual as the scattering of the flock of geese when the Prodigy shoots them for mere amusement. But the theme of the vanity of human wishes, the emptiness of ambition, becomes prominent earlier.

Widely acclaimed as a classic of contemporary fiction in Chinese, Taipei People has been frequently compared to James Joyce's Dubliners. Patrick Hanan praises the volume as "the highest achievement in the contemporary Chinese story." Henry Miller considers Pai Hsien-yung "a master of portraiture." Stories from this collection have already been translated into French, German, Italian, Dutch, Hebrew, Japanese and Korean.

The Mingjia (School of Names) is a notional grouping of philosophers first recorded as such in the Shiji. Their identifying feature was a concern with linguistic issues particularly involving the correct use of names. The origin of this concern is taken to be Lunyu XIII.3. The group, as listed in the Han Shu, comprised seven men living between the sixth and third centuries BC. Only four of these men have extant writings attributed to them (Deng Xi, Yin Wen, Hui Shi and Gongsun Long) and in three of these there are issues of authenticity. Nevertheless, it is an important group for an understanding of the development of pre-Qin philosophy as the men themselves and the concepts they explored feature prominently in the writings of the other schools. The present work contains four sections: (i) the extant writings of the four men; (ii) all significant references to them in other works up to the fourth century AD; (iii) other significant writing on the topics up to that time; and (iv) four appendices on specific issues concerning the school.

This fully annotated translation is a valuable addition to the study of T'an S'su-t'ung (Tan Sitong) as well as to our understanding of late Qing political thought.

?This volume comprises eight articles that fall into three groups: surveys of Chinese art and archaeology and their interrelationships, the exhibition of Chinese archaeological finds, and an account of Dunhuang studies in China up to 1947; animal styles, floral patterns and yinyang wuxing in Chinese art; and Chinese epigraphy.

The papers in this volume, prepared by social scientists with different specializations, address selected aspects of Hong Kong's post-War development.

The revolutionary writer and literary critic Lu Xun (Zhou Shuren, 1881–1936) is celebrated at home and abroad as one of the most groundbreaking and influential writers of modern China. A first-hand witness to China's social and political upheaval in the first half of the 20th century, he is remembered not only for his astute polemical essays and political articles but also for the short stories which explore the effects of contemporary social and cultural issues on the Chinese psyche.The stories in this collection are based on the 1955 compilation Lu Xun Xiao Shuo Ji, originally published in two collections, Call to Arms (1923) and At the Crossroads (1926). The ten stories included are: "Kuang ren riji" (A Madman's Diary), "Kong Yi Ji" (Kong Yiji), "Yao" (Medicine), "Mingtian" (Tomorrow), "Yi jian xiao shi" (An Incident), "Toufa de gushi" (A Story of Hair), "Fengbo" (Storm in a Teacup), "Guxiang" (My Old Home), "Zhufu" (New Year Sacrifice), and "Zai jiulou shang" (In the Restaurant).Targeted specifically for students of Chinese, the book is conveniently organized with the original Chinese text on the left-hand page and supplementary English explanations and Romanized spelling (pinyin) of difficult vocabulary, idiomatic expressions, and other phrases on the right (with more than 2,500 total). While literary and cultural treasures in themselves, Lu Xun's works have been largely inaccessible to students of Chinese, who often find themselves forced to constantly consult a dictionary while frequently missing important nuances in the text. This edition aims to eliminate such tedious and inefficient approaches to Lu Xun, while allowing students to appreciate these wonderful stories in the original Chinese.

An internationally recognized authority on Chinese history and a leading innovator in its telling, Cho-yun Hsu constructs an original portrait of Chinese culture. Unlike most historians, Hsu resists centering his narrative on China's political evolution, focusing instead on the country's cultural sphere and its encounters with successive waves of globalization. Beginning long before China's written history and extending through the twentieth century, Hsu follows the content and expansion of Chinese culture, describing the daily lives of commoners, their spiritual beliefs and practices, the changing character of their social and popular thought, and their advances in material culture and technology. In addition to listing the achievements of emperors, generals, ministers, and sages, Hsu builds detailed accounts of these events and their everyday implications. Dynastic change, the rise and fall of national ambitions, and the growth and decline of institutional systems take on new significance through Hsu's careful research, which captures the multiple strands that gave rise to China's pluralistic society. Paying particular attention to influential relationships occurring outside of Chinese cultural boundaries, he demonstrates the impact of foreign influences on Chinese culture and identity and identifies similarities between China's cultural developments and those of other nations.

Fifty lessons examining both structural patterns and morphological features characteristic of Mandarin Chinese. The book describes cultural idiosyncrasies in language use as well as gives discoursal strategies for forming sustained conversations.

This monograph is the first study of the reception of China in English literature, and the first comprehensive study on the image of China in Western literature written by prominent Chinese scholars such as Qian Zhongshu, Fan Cunzhong and Chen Shouyi. It complements such studies on the literary reception of China as Pierre Martino's L'Orient dans la litterature francaise au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siecle (1906), Ursula Aurich's China im Spiegel der deutschen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts (1935), and E. Horst Tscharner's China in der deutschen Dichtung bis zur Klassik (1939).

This is a collection of over 560 important and frequently-used Chinese political terms and phrases that appeared between 1949 and 1990. Each entry contains an explanation of the term and its origin, a description of how and under what circumstances the term was used, and a discussion of the changes of meaning over the years, as well as the political and social significance of the words.

This book examines the complex relationship between art and politics in the People's Republic of China from 1949 to 1984. It focuses in particular on three important aspects of this relationship - the organizational structure of China's art establishment, the ideological scheme that set the guidelines for all art work, and the use of political movements or campaigns to ensure that artists complied with the official policy.

As China's largest city best known for its pre-eminent achievements in the early part of the twentieth century, Shanghai grew modestly in comparison with southern China after the adoption of China's open policy in 1978. With the 1990 announcement of Pudong as an area for special development, Shanghai has raced ahead, seemingly on its way to an economic and cultural resurgence that is likely to accelerate development and modernization in the Yangzi Delta and China at large. This volume focuses on the physical and socioeconomic transformation of Shanghai across a wide range of topics. Drawing on the experience and expertise of researchers primarily in Hong Kong, this study is a major contribution to the subject of economic development and social change in China. It seeks to understand, analyze and interpret how Shanghai has transformed itself in recent years.