Category: China

Foreign Policy Article on China’s Copycat Cities

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boskerEiffelTower

Last week Foreign Policy posted an article, China’s Copycat Cities, written by Jack Carlson, on China’s recent re-creation of some of the West’s most iconic, historical attractions in its own backyard: Replicas of British towns complete with Tudor, Georgian, and Victorian buildings can now be found near Shanghai and Chengdu, in addition to at least two large-scale replicas of the Eiffel Tower and a highly accurate, full-scale White House outside Hangzhou, to name a few. Carlson mentions the reasons offered by European and American commentators for the presence of Bauhaus towns and a Sydney Opera House in China—the country’s “copycat syndrome,” “self-colonization”—but he also finds a fascinating parallel in Chinese history during the Qing with the Qianlong Emperor’s construction of the Western Palaces, which were closely based on the Trianon in Versailles. An excellent slide show accompanies the article.

UH Press’ forthcoming Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China, by Bianca Bosker, is the first definitive chronicle of this remarkable phenomenon in which entire buildings and towns appear to have been airlifted from their historic and geographic foundations in Europe and the Americas and spot-welded to Chinese cities. The latest book in the series Spatial Habitus: Making and Meaning in Asia’s Architecture, Original Copies will be available in January 2013.

UH Press at American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, November 17-20

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AAA logoUniversity of Hawai‘i Press is exhibiting at this year’s annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, which is being held at McCormick Place Convention Center, November 17-20.

Press acquisitions editor Patricia Crosby and Asian studies product manager Steven Hirashima are attending. Please visit us at Booth 219.

Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing

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Reinventing Modern China
Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing, by Huaiyin Li, offers the first systematic analysis of writings on modern Chinese history by historians in China from the early twentieth century to the present. It traces the construction of major interpretive schemes, the evolution of dominant historical narratives, and the unfolding of debates on the most controversial issues in different periods. Placing history-writing in the context of political rivalry and ideological contestation, Li explicates how the historians’ dedication to faithfully reconstructing the past was compromised by their commitment to an imagined trajectory of history that fit their present-day agenda and served their needs of political legitimation.

October 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3608-5 / $52.00 (CLOTH)

A Religious History of Pure Land Literature in Tibet

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Luminous Bliss
Pure Land Buddhism as a whole has received comparatively little attention in Western studies on Buddhism despite the importance of “buddha-fields” (pure lands) for the growth and expression of Mahāyāna Buddhism. In Luminous Bliss: A Religious History of Pure Land Literature in Tibet, the first religious history of Tibetan Pure Land literature, Georgios Halkias delves into a rich collection of literary, historical, and archaeological sources to highlight important aspects of this neglected pan-Asian Buddhist tradition. He clarifies many of the misconceptions concerning the interpretation of “other-world” soteriology in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism and provides translations of original Tibetan sources from the ninth century to the present that represent exoteric and esoteric doctrines that continue to be cherished by Tibetan Buddhists for their joyful descriptions of the Buddhist path. The book is informed by interviews with Tibetan scholars and Buddhist practitioners and by Halkias’ own participant-observation in Tibetan Pure Land rituals and teachings conducted in Europe and the Indian subcontinent.

“By providing both a sweeping historical overview of its development, and a detailed survey of its wide-ranging textual corpus, Luminous Bliss takes the study of the Tibetan Pure Land tradition to a whole new level. And in doing so Halkias reveals not only how the soteriology of Sukhavati shaped the practice of Buddhism in Tibet, but also how it informed Tibetan conceptualizations of the environment, society, and the state.” —Johan Elverskog, Southern Methodist University

Pure Land Buddhist Studies
September 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3590-3 / $49.00 (CLOTH)

Beyond East-West Binaries in (Auto)Biographical Studies

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Locating Life Stories
The thirteen essays in Locating Life Stories: Beyond East-West Binaries in (Auto)Biographical Studies, edited by Maureen Perkins, come from Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Malaysia, South Africa, and Hawai‘i. With a shared focus on the specific local conditions that influence the ways in which life narratives are told, the authors engage with a variety of academic disciplines, including anthropology, history, media studies, and literature, to challenge claims that life writing is an exclusively Western phenomenon. Addressing the common desire to reflect on lived experience, the authors enlist interdisciplinary perspectives to interrogate the range of cultural forms available for representing and understanding lives.

A Biography Monograph
September 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3730-3 / $28.00 (CLOTH)
Published in association with the Biographical Research Center

Song Culture in the Yingzao Fashi Building Manual

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Chinese Architecture and MetaphorChinese Architecture and Metaphor: Song Culture in the Yingzao Fashi Building Manual, by Jiren Feng, reveals significant and fascinating social and cultural phenomena in the most important primary text for the study of the Chinese building tradition. Unlike previous scholarship, which has reviewed this imperially commissioned architectural manual largely as a technical work, this volume considers the Yingzao Fashi’s unique literary value and explores the rich cultural implications in and behind its technical content.

“This fascinating and erudite study takes a fresh and original approach to the most significant document in Chinese architectural history. Taking the terminology and textual strategies of the Yingzao fashi as his starting point, and drawing both on literature and on the structures and aesthetics of surviving buildings, Jiren Feng develops a complex and sophisticated cultural analysis of the text and of Chinese historical traditions of architectural writing more broadly, demonstrating that matter and metaphor cannot be disentangled in Chinese architectural thinking and practice. As well as being an argument about architecture, this is a study of poetics and of sensibilities, and a history of the meaning of grand buildings in Chinese cosmology and politics.” —Francesca Bray, University of Edinburgh

June 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3363-3 / $53.00 (CLOTH)
Spatial Habitus: Making and Meaning in Asia’s Architecture
Published in association with Hong Kong University Press

New Books in Buddhist Studies Podcasts

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Listen to New Books Network podcasts featuring interviews with Press authors Hank Glassman, Bryan Cuevas, Lori Meeks, and Daniel Veidlinger: http://newbooksinbuddhiststudies.com/list/. New Books in Buddhist Studies presents discussions with scholars of Buddhism about their new books.

The New Books Network “is a consortium of podcasts dedicated to raising the level of public discourse by introducing serious authors to serious audiences.”

Early Chinese Military Texts from the Yi zhou shu

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Conquer and GovernChina’s Warring States era (ca. 5th–3rd century BCE) was the setting for an explosion of textual production, and one of the most sophisticated and enduring genres of writing from this period was the military text. Social and political changes were driven in large part by the increasing scope and scale of warfare, and some of the best minds of the day (including Sunzi, whose Art of War is still widely read) devoted their attention to the systematic analysis of all factors involved in waging war. Conquer and Govern, by Robin McNeal, makes available for the first time in any Western language a corpus of military texts from a long neglected Warring States compendium of historical, political, military, and ritual writings known as the Yi Zhou shu, or Remainder of the Zhou Documents.

May 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3120-2 / $48.00 (CLOTH)

UH Press at Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting This Month

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Holiday Web Sale 2011

The Association for Asian Studies annual meeting is UH Press’ biggest scholarly exhibit/conference: 300 new and recent Asia books and journals will be on display and editorial and marketing staff will be attending. The Press’ publishing partners Ateneo de Manila University Press, Cornell University East Asia Program, KITLV Press, NIAS Press, NUS Press (Singapore), and University of the Philippines Press will be exhibiting in neighboring booths, in addition to newcomer MerwinAsia. See you in Toronto!

New in the Kuroda Classics in East Asian Buddhism Series

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Signs from the Unseen RealmIn early medieval China hundreds of Buddhist miracle texts were circulated, inaugurating a trend that would continue for centuries. Each tale recounted extraordinary events involving Chinese persons and places—events seen as verifying claims made in Buddhist scriptures, demonstrating the reality of karmic retribution, or confirming the efficacy of Buddhist devotional practices. Robert Ford Campany, one of North America’s preeminent scholars of Chinese religion, presents Signs from the Unseen Realm: Buddhist Miracle Tales from Early Medieval China, the first complete, annotated translation, with in-depth commentary, of the largest extant collection of miracle tales from the early medieval period, Wang Yan’s Records of Signs from the Unseen Realm, compiled around 490 C.E.

Classics in East Asian Buddhism
March 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3602-3 / $65.00 (CLOTH)
Published in association with the Kuroda Institute

New Catalog: Asian Studies 2012

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Asian Studies 2012 catalog
The UH Press Asian Studies 2012 catalog is now available online. To view the 3.8M PDF, click on the cover image to the left.

Highlights include:

* A pioneering study of the fate of Buddhism during the communist period in Cambodia (Buddhism in a Dark Age: Cambodian Monks under Pol Pot)

* The first major work of Edogawa Ranpo (1894-1965), “Japan’s Edgar Allan Poe” (Strange Tale of Panorama Island)

* The first definitive chronicle of a remarkable phenomenon in Chinese architecture (Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China)

* A new volume in the Dimensions of Asian Spirituality series (Theravada Buddhism: The View of the Elders)

* A study of Buddhist miracle texts by one of the preeminent scholars of Chinese religion (Signs from the Unseen Realm: Buddhist Miracle Tales from Early Medieval China)

* Two new volumes in a series designed to help students learn the most frequently used Chinese characters (Remembering Traditional Hanzi 2; Remembering Simplified Hanzi 2)

* Innovative studies on Japanese popular and visual culture (Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girl Culture in Japan; Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan; The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan; Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age)

* A colorful, comprehensive guide to Hawai‘i’s Japanese Buddhist temples (Japanese Buddhist Temples of Hawai‘i: An Illustrated Guide)

* The latest books in a popular Korean language textbook series (Integrated Korean: Intermediate 1, Second Edition, Textbook, Workbook)

* A richly illustrated look at the artisans of Himachal Pradesh and their work (Making Faces: Self and Image Creation in a Himalayan Valley)

* An insider’s view of the sex trade on the Lao-Thai border (The Perfect Business? Anti-Trafficking and the Sex Trade along the Mekong)

Second Volume of Remembering Traditional Hanzi Now Available

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Remembering Traditional Hanzi 2Remembering Traditional Hanzi 2, by James W. Heisig and Timothy W. Richardson, is the second of two volumes designed to help students learn the meaning and writing of the 3,000 most frequently used traditional Chinese characters. (A parallel set of volumes has been prepared for simplified characters.) The 1,500 characters introduced in Book 1 include the top 1,000 by frequency, plus another 500 best learned at an early stage. Book 2 adds the remaining 1,500 characters to complete the set.

January 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3656-6 / $29.00 (PAPER)

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