China Studies – serie
Visar alla böcker i serien China Studies. Handla med fri frakt och snabb leverans.
39 produkter
39 produkter
Del 8 - China Studies
Death in Ancient China
The Tale of One Man's Journey
Inbunden, Engelska, 2006
2 296 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
This richly illustrated book provides a glimpse into the belief system and the material wealth of the social elite in pre-Imperial China through a close analysis of tomb contents and excavated bamboo texts. The point of departure is the textual and material evidence found in one tomb of an elite man buried in 316 BCE near a once wealthy middle Yangzi River valley metropolis. Particular emphasis is placed on the role of cosmological symbolism and the nature of the spirit world. The author shows how illness and death were perceived as steps in a spiritual journey from one realm into another. Transmitted textual records are compared with excavated texts. The layout and contents of this multi-chambered tomb are analyzed as are the contents of two texts, a record of divination and sacrifices performed during the last three years of the occupant’s life and a tomb inventory record of mortuary gifts. The texts are fully translated and annotated in the appendices.A first-time close-up view of a set of local beliefs which not only reflect the larger ancient Chinese religious system but also underlay the rich intellectual and artistic life of pre-Imperial China. With first full translations of texts previously unknown to all except a small handful of sinologists.
Del 14 - China Studies
Red-light Novels of the late Qing
Inbunden, Engelska, 2007
2 816 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
Chinese literature has traditionally been divided by both theorists and university course providers into ‘classical’ and ‘modern.’ This has left nineteenth-century fiction in limbo, and allowed negative assessments of its quality to persist unchecked. The popularity of Qing dynasty red-light fiction – works whose primary focus is the relationship between clients and courtesans, set in tea-houses, pleasure gardens, and later, brothels – has endured throughout the twentieth century. This volume explores why, arguing that these novels are far from the ‘low’ work of ‘frustrated scholars’ but in their provocative play on the nature of relations between client, courtesan and text, provide an insight into wider changes in understandings of self and literary value in the nineteenth century.
Del 15 - China Studies
State and Ethnicity in China's Southwest
Inbunden, Engelska, 2008
2 435 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
Twentieth century China has seen local societies undergo unprecedented transformations accompanied by a remarkable continuity in state practice. In this path-breaking study of two ethnically different communities, the matrilineal Mosuo and the patrilineal Han, in northwest Yunnan province, the author traces cultural change from a historical perspective in relation to the ecological environment and political systems. The treatment of state penetration into local society challenges the conventional binary narratives of state-society and Han/non-Han relations. With its interdisciplinary approach, the book enriches the anthropology of China by framing ethnicity issues in terms of local politics and inter-relationships between levels of government, and at the same time extends the analytical perimeter of the study of the Chinese state to the national periphery.
Del 16 - China Studies
Different Worlds of Discourse
Transformations of Gender and Genre in Late Qing and Early Republican China
Inbunden, Engelska, 2008
2 969 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
During the late Qing reform era (1895-1912), women for the first time in Chinese history emerged in public space in collective groups. They assumed new social and educational roles and engaged in intense debates about the place of women in China's present and future. These debates found expression in new media, including periodicals and pictorials, which not only harnessed the power of existing cultural forms but also encouraged experimentation with a variety of new literary genres and styles - works increasingly produced by and for Chinese women. Different Worlds of Discourse explores the reform period from three interrelated and comparatively neglected perspectives: the construction of gender roles, the development of literary genres, and the emergence of new forms of print media.
Del 20 - China Studies
Dong Zhongshu, a ‘Confucian’ Heritage and the Chunqiu fanlu
Inbunden, Engelska, 2011
2 989 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
Intellectual developments of the Western Han dynasty (202 BCE – 9 CE) have been studied hitherto on the assumptions that a system described as ‘Confucianism’ acquired paramount importance and that Dong Zhongshu (ca. 198 to ca. 107 BCE) had been responsible for formulating its principles. In challenging these assumptions, this book examines Dong’ career and reputation, and his supposed authorship of the Chunqiu fanlu, for long subject to question. It is concluded that while some parts of that text may well represent the teachings that Dong Zhongshu promoted, some may perhaps date from as late as 79 CE; still others bear an affinity to writings which, banned as being suspect or potentially subversive, survive in no more than fragmentary form.
Del 21 - China Studies
China on the Sea
How the Maritime World Shaped Modern China
Inbunden, Engelska, 2011
2 987 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
Generations of Chinese scholars have made China synonymous with the Great Wall and presented its civilization as fundamentally land-bound. This volume challenges this perspective, demonstrating that China was not a “Walled Kingdom”, certainly not since the Yongjia Disturbance in 311. China reached out to the maritime world far more actively than historians have acknowledged, while the seas and what came from the seas—from Islam, fragrances and Jesuits to maize, opium and clocks—significantly changed the course of history, and have been of inestimable importance to China since the Ming. This book integrates the maritime history of China, especially the Qing period, a subject which has hitherto languished on the periphery of scholarly analysis, into the mainstream of current historical narrative. It was the seas that made Tang China a “Cosmopolitan Empire” (Mark Lewis), the Song dynasty China’s “Greatest Age” (John Fairbank), China at 1600 “the largest and most sophisticated of all unified realms on earth” (Jonathan Spence), and the reign of the three Qing emperors (Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong) China’s “last golden age” (Charles Hucker).
Del 19 - China Studies
Springboard to Victory
Shandong Province and Chinese Communist Military and Financial Strength, 1937-1945
Inbunden, Engelska, 2011
3 449 kr
Skickas inom 3-6 vardagar
Did the Chinese Communists use money or banking systems during their struggle for national power? In the West, this question was not answered, or even raised, for sixty years after the Communists took over China in 1949. This book examines the Communists’ revenue and supply system during the Japanese occupation in Shandong, a coastal province in northern China. It explores how the Communists manipulated currency exchange rates to turn trade within the occupied zones into their principal source of revenue and transform the Japanese army and navy into their most important customers. Thus enabling them to stockpile the materials needed for the race against the Nationalists into Manchuria, China’s only industrialized area, immediately after Japan’s surrender.
Del 22 - China Studies
Visual Political Communication in Popular Chinese Television Series
Inbunden, Engelska, 2012
2 555 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
Visual Political Communication in Popular Chinese Television Series has been granted the EastAsiaNet 2014 Award!In Visual Political Communication in Popular Chinese Television Series, Florian Schneider analyses political discourses in Chinese TV dramas, the most popular entertainment format in China today. Schneider shows that despite their often nationalistic stories of glorious emperors and courageous officials, such programmes should not be mistaken for official propaganda. Instead, the highly didactical messages of such series are the outcome of complex cultural governance practices, which are influenced by diffuse political interests, commercial considerations, viewing habits, and ideological assumptions. Schneider argues that these interlinking factors lead to a highly restrictive creative environment and to conservative entertainment content that ultimately risks creating precisely the kind of passive masses that Chinese media workers and government officials are trying so hard to emancipate.
Del 23 - China Studies
Visualising China, 1845-1965
Life/Still images in Historical Narratives
Inbunden, Engelska, 2012
3 717 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
How does China project its image in the world? Why and how has the world come to form certain impressions of the Chinese and their way of life? These are issues that preoccupy Chinese citizens in the globalizing 21st century as they travel overseas, riding on the capacity of the country’s newly acquired economic power. In Visualizing China, the authors join forces to launch a broader inquiry aimed at a synergistic understanding of the larger story of visuality in modern China. The essays cluster around several nodal points including photographs, advertising, posters and movies, spanning from the 1840s to the 1960s, and devote special attention to modern Chinese practices in the visualization of things Chinese.
Del 24 - China Studies
Fragmenting Modernisms
Chinese Wartime Literature, Art, and Film, 1937-49
Inbunden, Engelska, 2013
3 135 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
In Fragmenting Modernisms, Carolyn FitzGerald traces the evolution of Chinese modernism during the War of Resistance against Japan (1937-45) and Chinese Civil War (1945-49) through a series of close readings of works of fiction, poetry, film, and visual art, produced in various locations throughout wartime China.Showing that the culture of this period was characterized by a high degree of formal looseness, she argues that such aesthetic fluidity was created in response to historical conditions of violence and widespread displacement. Moreover, she illustrates how the innovative formal experiments of uprooted writers and artists expanded the geographic and aesthetic boundaries of Chinese modernism far beyond the coastal cities of Shanghai and Beijing.
Del 26 - China Studies
Saving Lives in Wartime China
How Medical Reformers Built Modern Healthcare Systems Amid War and Epidemics, 1928-1945
Inbunden, Engelska, 2013
2 870 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
In the 1920s and 1930s most Chinese people suffered from overwhelming health problems. Epidemic diseases killed tens of millions, drought, flood and famine killed many more, and unhygienic birthing led to serious maternal and child mortality. The Civil War between Nationalist and Communist forces, and the nationwide War of Resistance against Japan (1937-1945), imposed a further tide of misery.Troubled by this extensive trauma, a small number of healthcare reformers were able to save tens of thousands of lives, promote hygiene and sanitation, and begin to bring battlefield casualties, communicable diseases, and maternal child mortality under control. This study shows how biomedical physicians and public health practitioners were major contributors to the rise of modern China.
Del 27 - China Studies
Science and Technology in Modern China, 1880s-1940s
Inbunden, Engelska, 2014
2 445 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
The first of its kind, this collection of critical essays opens up new venues in the comparative study of science and culture by focusing on the formative decades of modern China in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. It provides a wide-ranging examination of the cultural and intellectual history of science and technology in modern China.From anti-imperialism to the technology of Chinese writing, the commodification of novelties to the rise of the modern professional scientist, new lexica and appropriations of the past, the contributors map out a transregional and global circuitry of modern knowledge and practical know-how, nationalism and the amalgamation of new social practices.Contributors include: Iwo Amelung, Fa-ti Fan, Shen Guowei, Danian Hu, Joachim Kurtz, Eugenia Lean, Thomas S. Mullaney, Hugh Shapiro, Grace Shen, and Jing Tsu.
Del 25 - China Studies
Signifying the Local
Media Productions Rendered in Local Languages in Mainland China in the New Millennium
Inbunden, Engelska, 2013
2 673 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
In Signifying the Local, Jin Liu examines contemporary cultural productions rendered in local languages and dialects (fangyan) in the fields of television, cinema, music, and literature in Mainland China. This ground-breaking interdisciplinary research provides an account of the ways in which local-language media have become a platform for the articulation of multivocal, complex, and marginal identities in post-socialist China. Viewed from the uniquely revealing perspective of local languages, the mediascape of China is no longer reducible to a unified, homogeneous, and coherent national culture, and thus renders any monolithic account of the Chinese language, Chineseness, and China impossible.
Del 28 - China Studies
Print, Profit, and Perception
Ideas, Information and Knowledge in Chinese Societies, 1895-1949
Inbunden, Engelska, 2014
2 531 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
Print, Profit, and Perception examines the dynamic cross-cultural exchanges occurring in China and Taiwan from the first Sino-Japanese War to the mid-twentieth century. Drawing examples from various genres, this interdisciplinary volume presents nine empirically grounded case studies on the growth in the production, dissemination and consumption of texts, which lay behind a dramatic expansion of knowledge. The chapters collectively address the co-existence of globalization and localization processes in the period. By taking into account intra-Asian cultural encounters and tracing the multiple competing forces encountered by many, this book offers a fresh and compelling take on how individuals and social groups participated in transnational conceptual flows.Contributors include: Paul Bailey, Che-chia Chang, Elizabeth Emrich, Tze-ki Hon, Max K.W. Huang, Mei-e Huang, Mike Shi-chi Lan, Pei-yin Lin, and Weipin Tsai.
Del 29 - China Studies
Shanghai Filmmaking
Crossing Borders, Connecting to the Globe, 1922-1938
Inbunden, Engelska, 2014
3 065 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
In Shanghai Filmmaking, Huang Xuelei invites readers to go on an intimate, detailed, behind-the-scenes tour of the world of early Chinese cinema. She paints a nuanced picture of the Mingxing Motion Picture Company, the leading Chinese film studio in the 1920s and 1930s, and argues that Shanghai filmmaking involved a series of border-crossing practices.Shanghai filmmaking developed in a matrix of global cultural production and distribution, and interacted closely with print culture and theatre. People from allegedly antagonistic political groupings worked closely with each other to bring a new form of visual culture and a new body of knowledge to an audience in and outside China. By exploring various border crossings, this book sheds new light on the power of popular cultural production during China’s modern transformation.
Del 30 - China Studies
Struggle by the Pen
The Uyghur Discourse of Nation and National Interest, c.1900-1949
Inbunden, Engelska, 2015
2 692 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
In Struggle by the Pen, Ondřej Klimeš explores the emergence of national consciousness and nationalist ideology of Uyghurs in Xinjiang from c. 1900-1949. Drawing from texts written by modern Uyghur intellectuals, politicians and propagandists throughout this period, he identifies diverse types of Uyghur discourse on the nation and national interest, and traces the emergence and construction of modern Uyghur national identity. The author also demonstrates that the modern Uyghur intelligentsia regarded political emancipation and social modernization as the two most important interests of their nation, and that they envisaged Uyghurs as citizens of a modern republican state founded on the principles of representative government. This book thus presents a new perspective on Uyghur intellectual history and on Republican Xinjiang.
Del 32 - China Studies
Singing on the River
Sichuan Boatmen and Their Work Songs, 1880s - 1930s
Inbunden, Engelska, 2015
2 752 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
Singing on the River by Igor Chabrowski, based on Sichuan boatmen’s work songs (haozi), explores the little known world of mentality and self-representation of Chinese workers from the late 19th century until the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937). Chabrowski demonstrates how river workers constructed and interpreted their world, work, and gender in context of the dissolving social, cultural, and political orders. Boatmen asserted their own values, bemoaned exploitation, and imagined their sexuality largely in order to cope with their low social status. Through studying the Sichuan boatmen we gain an insight into the ways in which twentieth-century nonindustrial Chinese workers imagined their place in the society and appropriated, without challenging them, the traditional values.
Del 26 - China Studies
Saving Lives in Wartime China
How Medical Reformers Built Modern Healthcare Systems Amid War and Epidemics, 1928-1945
Häftad, Engelska, 2015
823 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
In the 1920s and 1930s most Chinese people suffered from overwhelming health problems. Epidemic diseases killed tens of millions, drought, flood and famine killed many more, and unhygienic birthing led to serious maternal and child mortality. The Civil War between Nationalist and Communist forces, and the nationwide War of Resistance against Japan (1937-1945), imposed a further tide of misery.Troubled by this extensive trauma, a small number of healthcare reformers were able to save tens of thousands of lives, promote hygiene and sanitation, and begin to bring battlefield casualties, communicable diseases, and maternal child mortality under control. This study shows how biomedical physicians and public health practitioners were major contributors to the rise of modern China.
Del 33 - China Studies
Problems of Han Administration
Ancestral Rites, Weights and Measures, and the Means of Protest
Inbunden, Engelska, 2016
2 270 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
Michael Loewe calls on literary and material evidence to examine three problems that arose in administering China’s early empires. Religious rites due to an emperor’s predecessors must both pay the correct services to his ancestors and demonstrate his right to succeed to the throne. In practical terms, tax collectors, merchants, farmers and townsmen required the establishment of a standard set of weights and measures that was universally operative and which they could trust. Those who saw reason to criticise the decisions taken by the emperor and his immediate advisors, whether on grounds of moral principles or political expediency, needed opportunities and the means of expressing their views, whether as remonstrants to the throne, by withdrawal from public life or as authors of private writings.
Del 34 - China Studies
Muslim Sanzijing
Shifts and Continuities in the Definition of Islam in China
Inbunden, Engelska, 2016
2 015 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
In Muslim Sanzijing, Shifts and Continuities in the Definition of Islam in China (1710-2010) Roberta Tontini traces the development of Islam and Islamic law in the country, while responding to two enduring questions in China’s intellectual history: How was the Muslim sharia reconciled with Confucianism? How was knowledge of Islamic social and ritual norms popularized to large segments of Chinese Muslim society even in periods of limited literacy?Through a comprehensive study that includes a rigorous analysis of popular Chinese Islamic primers belonging to the Sanzijing tradition, Tontini offers fresh insights on the little known intellectual and legal history of Islam on Chinese soil to convincingly demonstrate its evolving quality in response to changing social norms.
Del 35 - China Studies
Patriots' Game
Yongli Chemical Industries, 1917-1953
Inbunden, Engelska, 2016
2 401 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
“When thinking about modern China’s chemical industry, forget not Fan Xudong,” so declared Mao Zedong publicly after 1949. Although Mao might have united front politics in mind when invoking Fan as a paragon of the national bourgeoisie, why would the chairman praise a champion of private enterprise? How did Fan Xudong and his colleagues build Yongli from scratch into one of the largest industrial conglomerates in modern China amid predatory foreign competition and domestic strife? What were his secrets of success? Drawing from company documents, government archives, and personal correspondences, this book traces Yongli’s birth, growth, nationalization, and how Fan and his colleagues pursued a third path of national development between for-profit private enterprise and state ownership.
Del 37 - China Studies
Making of a Modern Art World
Institutionalization and Legitimatization of Guohua in Republican Shanghai
Inbunden, Engelska, 2017
2 805 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
The Making of A Modern Art World explores the artistic institutions and discursive practices prevailing in Republican Shanghai, aiming to reconstruct the operational logic and the stratified hierarchy of Shanghai’s art world. Using guohua as the point of entry, this book interrogates the discourse both of guohua itself, and the wider discourse of Chinese modernism in the visual arts. In the light of the sociological definition of ‘art world’, this book contextualizes guohua through focusing on the modes of production and consumption of painting in Shanghai, examining newly adopted modern artistic practices, namely, art associations, periodicals, art colleges, exhibitions, and the art market.
Del 39 - China Studies
Daily Life for the Common People of China, 1850 to 1950
Understanding Chaoben Culture
Inbunden, Engelska, 2018
3 647 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
In this exciting book, Ronald Suleski introduces daily life for the common people of China in the century from 1850 to 1950. They were semi-literate, yet they have left us written accounts of their hopes, fears, and values. They have left us the hand-written manuscripts (chaoben 抄本) now flooding the antiques markets in China. These documents represent a new and heretofore overlooked category of historical sources. Suleski gives a detailed explanation of the interaction of chaoben with the lives of the people. He offers examples of why they were so important to the poor laboring masses: people wanted horoscopes predicting their future, information about the ghosts causing them headaches, a few written words to help them trade in the rural markets, and many more examples are given. The book contains a special appendix giving the first complete translation into English of a chaoben describing the ghosts and goblins that bedeviled the poor working classes.
Del 40 - China Studies
Making of the Human Sciences in China
Historical and Conceptual Foundations
Inbunden, Engelska, 2019
3 134 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
This volume provides a history of how “the human” has been constituted as a subject of scientific inquiry in China from the seventeenth century to the present. Organized around four themes—“Parameters of Human Life,” “Formations of the Human Subject,” “Disciplining Knowledge,” and “Deciphering Health”—it scrutinizes the development of scientific knowledge and technical interest in human organization within an evolving Chinese society. Spanning the Ming-Qing, Republican, and contemporary periods, its twenty-four original, synthetic chapters ground the mutual construction of “China” and “the human” in concrete historical contexts. As a state-of-the-field survey, a definitive textbook for teaching, and an authoritative reference that guides future research, this book pushes Sinology, comparative cultural studies, and the history of science in new directions.
Del 41 - China Studies
‘Intoxicating Shanghai’ – An Urban Montage
Art and Literature in Pictorial Magazines during Shanghai’s Jazz Age
Inbunden, Engelska, 2020
3 676 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
In Intoxicating Shanghai, Paul Bevan explores the work of a number of Chinese modernist figures in the fields of literature and the visual arts, with an emphasis on the literary group the New-sensationists and its equivalents in the Shanghai art world, examining the work of these figures as it appeared in pictorial magazines. It undertakes a detailed examination into the significance of the pictorial magazine as a medium for the dissemination of literature and art during the 1930s. The research locates the work of these artists and writers within the context of wider literary and art production in Shanghai, focusing on art, literature, cinema, music, and dance hall culture, with a specific emphasis on 1934 – ‘The Year of the Magazine’.
Del 42 - China Studies
Chinese Families Upside Down: Intergenerational Dynamics and Neo-Familism in the Early 21st Century
Inbunden, Engelska, 2021
2 470 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
Chinese Families Upside Down offers the first systematic account of how intergenerational dependence is redefining the Chinese family. The authors make a collective effort to go beyond the conventional model of filial piety to explore the rich, nuanced, and often unexpected new intergenerational dynamics. Supported by ethnographic findings from the latest field research, novel interpretations of neo-familism address critical issues from fresh perspectives, such as the ambivalence in grandparenting, the conflicts between individual and family interests, the remaking of the moral self in the face of family crises, and the decisive influence of the Chinese state on family change. The book is an essential read for scholars and students of China studies in particular and for those who are interested in the present-day family and kinship in general.
Del 43 - China Studies
Chinese Animation and Socialism
From Animators’ Perspectives
Inbunden, Engelska, 2021
2 286 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
Please visit our blog to read an interview with Daisy Yan Du. This volume on Chinese animation and socialism is the first in English that introduces the insider viewpoints of socialist animators at the Shanghai Animation Film Studio in China. Although a few monographs have been published in English on Chinese animation, they are from the perspective of scholars rather than of the animators who personally worked on the films, as discussed in this volume. Featuring hidden histories and names behind the scenes, precious photos, and commentary on rarely seen animated films, this book is a timely and useful reference book for researchers, students, animators, and fans interested in Chinese and even world animation.This book originated from the Animators’ Roundtable Forum (April 2017 at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), organized by the Association for Chinese Animation Studies.
Del 44 - China Studies
Yangzi Waters: Transforming the Water Regime of the Jianghan Plain in Late Imperial China
Inbunden, Engelska, 2022
2 114 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
This book centers on the history of polders and investigates the complex hydro-social relationships of the Jianghan Plain in late imperial China. Once a hydraulic frontier where local communities managed the polders, the Jianghan Plain had become a state-led hydro-electric powerhouse by the mid-twentieth century. Through in-depth historical analysis, this book shows how water politics, cultural practice, and ecology interplayed and transformed the landscape and waterscape of the plain from a long-term perspective. By touching on topics such as religious practice, ethnic tensions and local militarization, the author reveals a plain forever caught between land and water, and nature and culture.
Del 45 - China Studies
River-Sand Mining: An Ethnography of Resource Conflict in China
Inbunden, Engelska, 2021
2 331 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
This book explores the overexploitation of river-sand and its impact on Zhuang communities in China. A topical phenomenon, the book engages with the concept of authoritarian environmental management through a detailed analysis of state laws and policies on river-sand mining. Additional rich ethnographic material shows that riverfront Zhuang villagers and their indigenous ecological knowledge cannot compete with government policy, economic forces, and development trends in gaining control over river sand governance. This book provides appealing case studies in the interdisciplinary field of political ecology. As an example of "anthropology of home", it is of specific methodological interest.
Del 46 - China Studies
Utopia in the Revival of Confucian Education
An Ethnography of the Classics-reading Movement in Contemporary China
Inbunden, Engelska, 2022
2 167 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
Sandra Gilgan’s Utopia in the Revival of Confucian Education examines the classics-reading movement in contemporary China as not only driven by attraction to certain elements of tradition, but even more by caesuras in the past that caused people to detach from their cultural roots. The author argues that activism in the classics-reading movement arises from an entanglement of past, present, and future. Social and political upheaval in the near past of the twentieth century caused people to disconnect from their traditional culture and ways of living, resulting in the present need to reconnect with perceived “original” culture and tradition from the more distant past. Through peoples’ imaginaries of a better future that are informed by past traditions, new ways of the past find entrance into life and education in study halls and academies. This new study draws on multi-sited ethnographic field research in ten Chinese cities, with the broadest database currently available. It combines theoretical elements from anthropology, history, sociology and sinology in a grounded theory approach. As an interdisciplinary study, the book is of interest for academics in Asian and Chinese studies, heritage and memory studies, religious studies, educational sciences, history, and cultural anthropology, as well as social and political sciences.