"The Qing Empire faced a crisis in the nineteenth century of corruption, population pressure, food shortages, ecological and infrastructural decay, rebellion, and a foreign threat from the West. This study uses the literati reformer Bao Shichen as a prism to understand contempor…
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, booming demand for natural resources transformed China and its frontiers. Historians of China have described this process in stark terms: pristine borderlands became breadbaskets. Yet Manchu and Mongolian archives reveal a different st…
"This book draws from newly available sources of women's writings from late imperial China to present an alternative approach to the lives of 'exemplary women'--a category of women who were written into official dynastic histories for their unrelenting adherence to female virtue…
"Yan Yuan (1635-1704) has long been a controversial figure in the study of Chinese intellectual and cultural history. Although marginalized in his own time largely due to his radical attack on Zhu Xi (1130-1200), Yan became elevated as a great thinker during the early twentieth …
"The original Manchu and Mongol documents selected for this publication, translated and amply annotated, provide fascinating new information about the relations between Manchus and Mongols before the Manchu conquest of China." "They include diplomatic correspondence, military li…
"The Qing dynasty (1636-1912)--a crucial bridge between "traditional" and "modern" China--was remarkable for its expansiveness and cultural sophistication. This engaging and insightful history of Qing political, social, and cultural life traces the complex interaction between th…