Elleman Bruce A. (ed.). — Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2023. — xlv, 298 p. In this ground-breaking, posthumous study, the late Lo Jung-pang discusses the geographic, political, and commercial factors that led to the emergence of seapower and a navy under the Ming. While Zheng He and his seven expeditions have received some scholarly attention, few...
Oxford University Press, 1996. — 252 p. In the tradition of Barbara Tuchman and Jonathan Spence, former veteran National Geographic staff writer Louise Levathes delivers a vivid, you-are-there account of the great age of Chinese maritime exploration. Levathes takes a fascinating look at China's rise as a naval power--and its plunge into isolation when a new emperor ascended the...
Oxford University Press, 2012. — 421 p. Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors challenges readers to reconsider China's relations with the rest of Eurasia. Investigating interstate competition and cooperation between the successive Sui and Tang dynasties and Turkic states of Mongolia from 580 to 800, Jonathan Skaff upends the notion that inhabitants of China and Mongolia...
Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 2013. — 255 p. An interesting, if eclectic, collection of essays based upon a conference held in Binghamton University in 2009. Includes articles by the renewed architectural historian Nancy Steinhardt on the "Eurasian Impacts on the Yuan Observatory in Haocheng" and frontier expert Morris Rossabi's essay on "Mongol Influences on the Ming...
University of California Press, 1983. — 246 p. Scholars have long accepted China's own view of its traditional foreign relations: that China devised its own world order and maintained it from the second century B.C. to the nineteenth century. China ruled out equality with any nation: foreign rulers and their envoys were treated as subordinates or inferiors, required to send...
Philadelphia, USA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. — 293 p. — ISBN: 978-0-8122-4370-3. The author of the present volume, Sanping Chen, has the great virtue of being able to examine the past with a fresh eye. He does not take any received text or tradition at face value. Instead, he closely reexamines all the available evidence and subjects secondary interpretations to...
Routledge, 2001. — 299 p. Drawing on classical Chinese sources and the best modern scholarship from China and Japan, David A. Graff connects military affairs with political and social developments to show how China's history was shaped by war. The first survey of medieval Chinese military history to be published in English, this seminal text will be of appeal to readers of both...
Hong Kong University Press, 2012. — 378 p. Lo Jung-pang (1912-1981) was a renowned professor of Chinese history at the University of California at Davis. In 1957 he completed a 600-page typed manuscript entitled China as a Sea Power, 1127-1368, but he died without arranging for the book to be published. Bruce Elleman found the manuscript in the UC Davis archives in 2004, and...
Frontline Books, 2014. — 236 p. The Defence of Heaven brings together, for the first time in one volume, a complete history of the Jin, Song and Ming dynasties' wars fought against the Mongols. Lasting nearly two centuries, these wars, fought to defend Chinese civilisation against a brutal and unrelenting foe, pitted personal heroics against the inexorable Mongol war machine...
Harvard University Asia Center, 2008. — 475 p. This collection of essays reveals the Ming court as an arena of competition and negotiation, where a large cast of actors pursued individual and corporate ends, personal agency shaped protocol and style, and diverse people, goods, and tastes converged. Rather than observing an immutable set of traditions, court culture underwent...
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. — Columbia, Columbia University, 2006. — 250 p. Scholars of medieval China agree that between the late Tang (618-907) and the early Song (960-1279), Chinese society underwent a remarkable cultural, social, political, and economic...
Cambridge University Press, 2016. — 318 p. On July 19, 1048, the Yellow River breached its banks, drastically changing its course across the Hebei Plain and turning it into a delta where the river sought a path out to the ocean. This dramatic shift of forces in the natural world resulted from political deliberation and hydraulic engineering of the imperial state of the Northern...
Pen and Sword, 2018. — 240 p. Julian Romane examines the military events behind the emergence of the Sui and Tang dynasties in the period 581-626 AD. Narrating the campaigns and battles, he analyses in detail the strategy and tactics employed, a central theme being the collision of the steppe cavalry with Chinese infantry armies. By the fourth century AD, horse nomads had...
Cambridge; New York; Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2017. — xx, 328 p. — ISBN: 9781316647486. In this major new study, Nicolas Tackett proposes that the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127) witnessed both the maturation of an East Asian inter-state system and the emergence of a new worldview and sense of Chinese identity among educated elites. These developments together...
Cambridge University Press, 2017. — 354 p. In this major new study, Nicolas Tackett proposes that the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127) witnessed both the maturation of an East Asian inter-state system and the emergence of a new worldview and sense of Chinese identity among educated elites. These developments together had sweeping repercussions for the course of Chinese history,...
Leiden: Brill, 2005. x, 726 p. ISBN: 1433707004, 9781433707001 Covering the period from the establishment of Sui to the fall of Southern Sung, this reference work for the first time gives a full and conveniently arrranged overview of China’s diplomatic and trade relations with its major and minor Asian neighbours. Basing himself on his yearlong research of Chinese offical...
Brill, 2005. — 290 p. — ISBN: 9781429453462 This study of relations between Sung China (960-1279) and Kitan Liao (916-1125), a state on Sung's northern border, is both a military and diplomatic history and a history of diplomacy. Its first chapters historically contextualise the equality of Sung-Liao diplomacy and narrate how, during the late tenth and early eleventh centuries,...