Culture & Civilization of China – serie

From Neolithic painted petroglyphs, early paintings on silk, and landscapes by twelfth-century literati to the traditional handscrolls being produced today, Chinese painting has always had the power to enthrall. This magnificent book, written by a team of eminent international scholars, is the first to recount the history of Chinese painting over a span of some three thousand years. Drawing on museum collections, archives, and archaeological sites in China—including many resources never before available to Western scholars—as well as on collections in other countries, the authors present and analyze the very best examples of Chinese painting: more than 300 of them are reproduced here in color. Both accessible to the general reader and revelatory for the scholar, the book provides the most up-to-date and detailed history of China’s pictorial art available today.In this book the authors rewrite the history of Chinese art wherever it is found—in caves, temples, or museum collections. They begin by grounding the Western reader in Chinese traditions and practices, showing in essence how to look at a Chinese painting. They then shed light on such topics as the development of classical and narrative painting, the origins of the literati tradition, the flowering of landscape painting, and the ways the traditions of Chinese painting have been carried into the present day. The book, which concludes with a glossary of techniques and terms and a list of artists by dynasty, is an essential resource for all lovers of, or newcomers to, Chinese painting.Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting is the inaugural volume in a new series, The Culture & Civilization of China, a joint publishing venture of Yale University Press and the American Council of Learned Societies with the China International Publishing Group in Beijing. The undertaking will ultimately result in the publication of more than seventy-five volumes on the visual arts, classical literature, language, and philosophy, as well as several comprehensive reference volumes.Published in association with Foreign Languages Press, Beijing

Written by the Han philosopher Xu Gan (A.D. 170–217), Balanced Discourses is an inquiry into the causes of political breakdown. It provides a unique contemporary account of the social, intellectual, and cosmological factors that Xu Gan identified as having precipitated the demise of the Han order. This edition of Zhonglun (or Balanced Discourses) contains the original Chinese text with annotations and, on facing pages, an English translation also accompanied by annotations.This collection of essays spans a range of topics, from Confucian cultivation to calendrical calculation. Xu’s perspectives are of not only historical but also philosophical interest, for they reveal his belief in a special correlative bond that should exist between names and actualities and his understanding of what happens when that bond is broken. The translator, John Makeham, argues in his introduction that the essays display the same quality of balance that Xu Gan sees as essential to social and political equilibrium.