Welten Ostasiens - Worlds of East Asia - Mondes de l'Extrême Orient – serie

This thesis is a direct contribution in the field history of thoughts in Late Imperial China, and it adds insight about the reception of tradition in the first half of the 20th century, in particular Confucianism. It explores the criticism of one school (the orthodox daoxue-Confucianism) against another (hanxue-Confucianism) by studying one object of criticism in particular. The author of the criticism, Fang Dongshu (1772-1851), attacks Dai Zhen (1723-1777). Hitherto, research in the 20th century had celebrated Dai Zhen and the scholars of his school of thought/method as precursors to scientific thinking in pre-modern China. Similarly the orthodox schools were set aside as opponents to modernization of society and philosophy. Through the thorough study of arguments made on both sides, this thesis suggests a different understanding, because scholars that lived in a Confucian society had different requirements about Confucian teachings and their impact.Considering the points Fang Dongshu points out about his adversaries contributes to a historically more accurate understanding of the history of Chinese philosophy before the Opium Wars and the end of the Imperial Age.

The series Worlds of East Asia of the Swiss Asia Society publishes high-quality research on present-day and historical East Asian cultures and societies covering fields such as history, literature, philosophy, politics and arts, as well as interpretations and translations of primary sources. Furthermore the series presents studies focusing on current topics and affairs appealing not only to the academic public, but also to a public generally interested in East Asia.The series provides a forum for scholarly work in the fields of humanities and social sciences in Switzerland. However, the series is also committed to the rich variety of studies and writing on East Asia in the international research community. The principal languages of publication of monographs and anthologies are German, French and English.The series is supervised by an editorial board which is advised by representatives in East Asian Studies.

This book is a much-needed scholarly intervention and postcolonial corrective that examines why and when and how misunderstandings of Chinese writing came about and showcases the long history of Chinese theories of language. 'Ideography' as such assumes extra-linguistic, trans-historical, universal 'ideas' which are an outgrowth of Platonism and thus unique to European history. Classical Chinese discourse assumes that language (and writing) is an arbitrary artifact invented by sages for specific reasons at specific times in history. Language by this definition is an ever-changing technology amenable to historical manipulation; language is not the House of Being, but rather a historically embedded social construct that encodes quotidian human intentions and nothing more. These are incommensurate epistemes, each with its own cultural milieu and historical context. By comparing these two traditions, this study historicizes and decolonializes popular notions about Chinese characters, exposing the Eurocentrism inherent in all theories of ideography. Ideography and Chinese Language Theory will be of significant interest to historians, sinologists, theorists, and scholars in other branches of the humanities.

The series Worlds of East Asia of the Swiss Asia Society publishes high-quality research on present-day and historical East Asian cultures and societies covering fields such as history, literature, philosophy, politics and arts, as well as interpretations and translations of primary sources. Furthermore the series presents studies focusing on current topics and affairs appealing not only to the academic public, but also to a public generally interested in East Asia.The series provides a forum for scholarly work in the fields of humanities and social sciences in Switzerland. However, the series is also committed to the rich variety of studies and writing on East Asia in the international research community. The principal languages of publication of monographs and anthologies are German, French and English.The series is supervised by an editorial board which is advised by representatives in East Asian Studies.

The Gongsun Longzi is often considered the only extant work of the Classical Chinese “School of Names”, an early intellectual tradition (trad. dated to the 4th cent. B.C.) mainly concerned with logic and the philosophy of language. The Gongsun Longzi is a heterogeneous collection of five chapters that include short treatises and largely fictive dialogues between an anonymous persuader and his opponent, which typically revolve around a paradoxical claim. Its value as a testimony to Early Chinese philosophy, however, is somewhat controversial due to the intricate textual history of the text and our limited knowledge about its intellectual backgrounds. This volume gathers contributions by leading specialists in the fields of Classical Chinese philosophy, philology, logic, and linguistics. Besides an overview of the scholarly literature on the topic and a detailed account of the reception of the text throughout time, it presents fresh insights into philological and philosophical problems raised by the Gongsun Longzi and other closely-related texts equally attributed to the “School of Names”.

What did Old Chinese prose sound like? Supported by digital texts, modern technologies and historical linguistics, Chinese Euphonics is a deep dive into the types of sound patterns that occur throughout the earliest corpora of narrative texts in the Chinese canon: the Western Zhou bronze inscriptions, the Classic of Documents《尚書》and the Zuo Commentary to the Spring and Autumn Annals《春秋左傳》.Tharsen demonstrates how sound patterns in the speeches preserved in these foundational texts functioned in concert with form and meaning to create "phonorhetoric," a tactic employed by some of the most eminent figures from Chinese antiquity to beautify and strengthen their arguments and ideas by making use of extensive phonological patterning and the power of sound.Containing both a broad history of the study of prose rhyming and a wealth of new evidence, Chinese Euphonics lays the groundwork for a new and more comprehensive approach to the study of early Chinese texts.

The book offers a cultural, historical and literary study of dream narration in Chinese literature (particularly in the literary genres of xiaoshuo 小說, "petty talk" and biji 筆記, "notebook"). It considers texts from Late Imperial China (13th–19th centuries), with an emphasis on the early/mid-Qing dynasty.

This volume is distinctive for its extraordinarily interdisciplinary investigations into a little discussed topic, the spatial imagination. It probes the exercise of the spatial imagination in pre-modern China across five general areas: pictorial representation, literary description, cartographic mappings, and the intertwining of heavenly and earthly space. It recommends that the spatial imagination in the pre-modern world cannot adequately be captured using a linear, militarily framed conceptualization. The scope and varying perspectives on the spatial imagination analyzed in the volume’s essays reveal a complex range of aspects that informs how space was designed and utilized. Due to the complexity and advanced scholarly level of the papers, the primary readership will be other scholars and advanced graduate students in history, history of science, geography, art history, religious studies, literature, and, broadly, sinology.

The series Worlds of East Asia of the Swiss Asia Society publishes high-quality research on present-day and historical East Asian cultures and societies covering fields such as history, literature, philosophy, politics and arts, as well as interpretations and translations of primary sources. Furthermore the series presents studies focusing on current topics and affairs appealing not only to the academic public, but also to a public generally interested in East Asia.The series provides a forum for scholarly work in the fields of humanities and social sciences in Switzerland. However, the series is also committed to the rich variety of studies and writing on East Asia in the international research community. The principal languages of publication of monographs and anthologies are German, French and English.The series is supervised by an editorial board which is advised by representatives in East Asian Studies.

The series Worlds of East Asia of the Swiss Asia Society publishes high-quality research on present-day and historical East Asian cultures and societies covering fields such as history, literature, philosophy, politics and arts, as well as interpretations and translations of primary sources. Furthermore the series presents studies focusing on current topics and affairs appealing not only to the academic public, but also to a public generally interested in East Asia.The series provides a forum for scholarly work in the fields of humanities and social sciences in Switzerland. However, the series is also committed to the rich variety of studies and writing on East Asia in the international research community. The principal languages of publication of monographs and anthologies are German, French and English.The series is supervised by an editorial board which is advised by representatives in East Asian Studies.

This book offers a path-breaking survey of the various efforts to rethink, methodologically delimit, enact, and represent the changing relationship between the modernizing nation-state of China, its premodern history and culture, and its endemic and/or iconic plants. It is a literature and philosophy as well as cultural history contribution to the sinological academia.By exploring the entanglement of plants in the construction of national identity in modern China, it demonstrates that, by joining the world scientific stage through categorization and compilation of its objects, the nation has braided its own time and space into the world system, and renjian caomu (the grass and trees of the human world) thusbecame minzu zhiwu (ethno-plants). Moreover, all those different embodiments of caomu, national flower candidates, shuishan, ethno-plants, plane trees and ginkgos, each summon certain temporal and spatial angles and features, hovering between cultural symbolism and modern horticulture. They all join the transformation in which the location of China is anchored on the world map and on the natural land, while its past and future are imagined and rewritten in the form of Chinese history and modernity.

The Lǐyē 里耶 text corpus, which is named after an ancient township in present-day Lóngshān 龍山, Húnán province, grants unique opportunities to reshape the image and redefine our knowledge about social, legal, political, administrative and ritual responsibilities of the first Chinese empire. The impressive collection of over 37,000 documents span a time period from 222 to 208 BC and grant a unique opportunity to reshape the image and redefine our knowledge about social, legal, political, logistical and ritual responsibilities of the first Chinese empire. This book is concerned with the overall governance at the southern fringes of the Qín dynasty as reflected in the excavated documents from Lǐyē well J1. It contributes to a revised understanding of the Qín dynasty by demonstrating that the degree of decentralization in the empire was high and to a large extent coordinated by relatively autonomously governed regions. It furthermore displays the Qín dynasty’s strong sense of historical continuity and a desire to strive towards unification by embracing the predominant standards of earlier rulers. After an introductory part on the Lǐyē material, this book analyzes Qín’s sophisticated methods of calendar and timekeeping. It then dwells into the territoriality of the young empire and focuses on unification attempts bound to transform the pre-imperial multistate order into a standardized system of governance and control. The last part deals with the organization of essential resources, including unprecedented tax calculations ‘district’ (xiāng 鄉) level. Overall, this book offers a fascinating glimpse at the many microstructures and complexities in the peripheral area of a larger administration. The manuscripts available to us to this day and the ones that will be excavated from wells J2 and J3 in the future will undoubtedly continue to be a basic reference point when it comes to the research of pre-imperial and early imperial documents.

The series Worlds of East Asia of the Swiss Asia Society publishes high-quality research on present-day and historical East Asian cultures and societies covering fields such as history, literature, philosophy, politics and arts, as well as interpretations and translations of primary sources. Furthermore the series presents studies focusing on current topics and affairs appealing not only to the academic public, but also to a public generally interested in East Asia.The series provides a forum for scholarly work in the fields of humanities and social sciences in Switzerland. However, the series is also committed to the rich variety of studies and writing on East Asia in the international research community. The principal languages of publication of monographs and anthologies are German, French and English.The series is supervised by an editorial board which is advised by representatives in East Asian Studies.

Human existence is fundamentally defined by time. Throughout history and across cultures, societies have negotiated time in various ways. This monograph studies temporality as it emerges from diaries produced by government officials during the late thirteenth century in Japan, thereby contributing a perspective gleaned from non-literary texts to the study of time in the social sphere of noble elites in the Kamakura period. In synthesising different approaches to the study of time, it analyses various aspects of time to obtain a comprehensive picture of how time is expressed in these diaries, scrutinise the time practices that they disclose, and reflect on related conceptualisations and evaluations of time. The monograph argues that we may discern a plurality of coexisting modes of time and that certain aspects and concerns took precedence over others in different situations depending on the symbolic forms that dominated them. As part of the ‘Time in Medieval Japan’ (TIMEJ) research project of the University of Zurich, this research aims to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of medieval Japan as multi-faceted society with diverse approaches to time.

This volume is distinctive for its extraordinarily interdisciplinary investigations into a little discussed topic, the spatial imagination. It probes the exercise of the spatial imagination in pre-modern China across five general areas: pictorial representation, literary description, cartographic mappings, and the intertwining of heavenly and earthly space. It recommends that the spatial imagination in the pre-modern world cannot adequately be captured using a linear, militarily framed conceptualization. The scope and varying perspectives on the spatial imagination analyzed in the volume’s essays reveal a complex range of aspects that informs how space was designed and utilized. Due to the complexity and advanced scholarly level of the papers, the primary readership will be other scholars and advanced graduate students in history, history of science, geography, art history, religious studies, literature, and, broadly, sinology.