China's Cultural Heritage: The Qing Dynasty, 1644-1912

by Richard J. Smith

Book Overview

The Qing Dynasty (1644-1912)--a crucial bridge between "traditional" and "modern" China--was a period remarkable for its expansiveness and cultural sophistication. In this extensively revised and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813313473
• ISBN13: 9780813313474
• Release Date: June 1994
• Publisher: Westview Press
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

An excellent text for anyone interested in Chinese culture

While there are many books that cover periods of Chinese history, there are far fewer that cover the cultural and mental landscape of those historical periods. This text is one of the few that truly succeeds in explaining how and why this specific period (the Qing Dynasty, 1644-1911) was unique in China's history. The very foreignness of the ruling elite, the Manchus, always ensured a distinctiveness to this reign. Yet it was additionally always the Manchu intent to tolerate, incorporate, and at times even promote those elements of the conquered Chinese society that would bring stability and success to the empire. The text's first three chapters on the Qing inheritance, political order and its social and economic institutions thus set the stage for the following chapters on language, prominent philosophies, religion, art, literature, social life, and emergence into the 20th Century. The chapters on language (Ch. 5), art (Ch. 8) and literature (Ch. 9) are especially well-written; truly insightful in their understanding of these subjects and well-written in a style that is page-turning. I would have loved to have been an undergraduate in Professor Smith's class at Rice; he must be one of their leading instructors and it is clear that these well-written, easy-to-understand chapters are the result of having mastered the challenging task of making very complicated information easily understood (as the compiler of the "Mustard Seed Garden Manual" referred to below, wrote, "If you aim for simplicity, master complexity"). An example from his chapter on Chinese art, a subject that is of particular interest to me: all art historians have studied the importance of the yin/yang bipolarities in understanding the influences at work in Chinese art, yet Smith covers this subject so he can continue to show its importance in understanding Chinese connoisseurship. In the section on painting and calligraphy, for example, he explains the criteria that brushwork needs to embody both the Confucian concept of 'li' (which he defines as "a standard for realism and general metaphor for creative process") as well as 'qi' (spirit) in order to create an organic whole. This artistic oneness is expressed in Chinese as 'kaihe' ("opening and closing" or "expanding and contracting"), and through the yin/yang lens thus creates the expectation within traditional Chinese painting that there will always be a balance of the two forces--the brush moves down before coming up, lightness will be complemented with darkness, movement with stillness, to create a harmonic and rhythmic whole. Seen in this light, the full understanding of why the Chinese have chosen the expression 'shanshui' ("mountains + water") to identify landscape paintings takes on a deeper meaning. This book is worth this chapter alone and I have recommended it to many who want to have a deeper understanding of Chinese art. A final word: the author writes in the preface to the second edition that he has taken to heart

Masterful

Nuanced and wide-ranging, there is no better introduction to the texture of late Imperial Chinese culture and society than this volume.

A rich portrait of a culture

This book is a model for what a cultural survey should be. It begins with an excellent brief survey of Chinese history of the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries, then surveys many things I wanted to know about an alien culture. I was most intrigued by the chapter on "Language and Symbolic Reference" (read after my brief traveller's survival course in Manderin). Dr. Smith explored not only the differences between the language and those of the West, but their implications for the Chinese style of thought: e.g., the spoken vocabulary is rich in homonyms and puns, leading to a style of reasoning by analogy and verbal similarity that comes far less naturally to speakers of the Romance languages. Smith also covers, for instance, social class, economics, religion and philosophy, art, literature, popular culture...an endless parade of the things mere histories rarely mention.This is certainly the most interesting book I've read in a decade. I highly recommend it.

One of the best books ever written

This book gives a detailed picture of Qing Dynasty which ruled China from 1644-1912. It also tells the creation of the mighty empire and how it end feudalism in China. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in Chinese history.