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Early Medieval China: A Sourcebook
This innovative sourcebook builds a dynamic understanding of China's early medieval period (220–589) through an original selection and arrangement of literary, historical, religious, and critical texts. A tumultuous and formative era, these centuries saw the longest stretch of political fragmentation in China's imperial history, resulting in new ethnic configurations, the rise of powerful clans, and a pervasive divide between north and south.
Deploying thematic categories, the editors sketch the period in a novel way for students and, by featuring many texts translated into English for the first time, recast the era for specialists. Thematic topics include regional definitions and tensions, governing mechanisms and social reality, ideas of self and other, relations with the unseen world, everyday life, and cultural concepts. Within each section, the editors and translators introduce the selected texts and provide critical commentary on their historical significance, along with suggestions for further reading and research.
Deploying thematic categories, the editors sketch the period in a novel way for students and, by featuring many texts translated into English for the first time, recast the era for specialists. Thematic topics include regional definitions and tensions, governing mechanisms and social reality, ideas of self and other, relations with the unseen world, everyday life, and cultural concepts. Within each section, the editors and translators introduce the selected texts and provide critical commentary on their historical significance, along with suggestions for further reading and research.
720 pages, Paperback
First published February 12, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 22, 2024
The textbook Early Medieval China: A Sourcebook is divided into multiple sections, each of which is devoted to a specific topic. The text gives a variety of different sources, analysis, and interpretation of those sources relating to life for ordinary people, the activities of scholars, social mobility, and so on.
The split of material across topics is fairly even in this text, but the amount of focus of certain material from certain geographic regions is most certainly not. I also couldn’t help but feel that the text might have been better if rather than focusing on so many disparate topics it focused on “hard history” so to speak more. I might even suggest that simply translating the biographies of certain individuals that they noted who lived in multiple dynasties and many years might have been more effective a venture at illustrating the events that happened across time and space within early medieval China.
Some novel work on say population estimates for the different dynasties via graphs, production of certain kinds of products in total at certain time periods and the like would have been helpful to understand the balance of power between the different states. This is my preference for bigger picture details like overall geopolitical and geostrategic speaking here though. The difference in certain types of food products and the like is explored, but not at as high a macroscopic level as I would have liked.
The text makes it easier to grasp the cultural split between the north and south in multiple arenas: From funerary documents to certain festivals and types of foodstuffs.
Individuals who dislike poetry will probably not enjoy reading a good number of the chapters, as the importance of poetry, while naturally very high in the past, can’t cause modern men and women without an interest in it to feel the same enthusiasm that medieval people did. I’m one such individual, although ironically, I found the historical context that the enthusiasm for poetry and the social mobility that being skilled at it produced fascinating and interesting to think about. Ladders for social mobility are a fascinating and important mechanism for societies, and the explanation of poetry, pure conversation, and other means by which families gained wealth and improved their station were a pleasure to learn about.
In regards to the religious material that was examined: If someone isn’t well versed in Buddhism and religious Daoism, those texts might seem very confusing to them and I’m not sure this text does a particularly good job at explaining some of these texts in a way that doesn’t force the reader to flip back and forth between the main body and the footnotes.
I was familiar with and enjoyed Robert Ford Campany’s work before reading this sourcebook, and was a little disappointed that the essay he wrote about the history of minor things/weird accounts was the same essay in many regards as that which I’ve read in the introductory pages to numerous collections of the Strange Accounts genre. That won’t be a problem for everyone who reads this text though.
I found the writer pointing out “It is equally certain that people living before this era had experienced self-awareness as unique individuals.” extremely odd. Perhaps I’m missing what they mean, but the mundane reality of human beings existing as individual biological entities makes this an insipid observation. I’m somewhat confused by the claim that this period is regarded as the “Rise of Individualism” in China.
Individualism as an intellectual movement of the Medieval period does not seem to me to be extraordinary or a break from previous eras in Chinese history. Even in the Analects it's noted that Kongfuzi’s disciple came across hermits who wished to avoid the problems of the world. Zhuangzi notes that the turtle dragging its tail through the mud is happier than the sacrificial turtle when he declines office. There seems to me to be a clear and present continuity between the hermits of the past and “present” of the early medieval period so I don’t quite grasp the reason that it seems like they’re trying to make it seem like something unique happened during this time period.
Overall, while the point of a sourcebook like this is to sort of cover a wide breadth, I think it might have benefited from concentration on being a sourcebook on some particular topic: Political system (of the different dynasties), social mobility (in different dynasties) or whatever topic. In contrast to a Sourcebook like the Wing Tsit-Chin Sourcebook on Chinese philosophy this text feels a little unfocused and not “deep enough” even though I’m aware it isn’t supposed to be, I still don’t like it.
The split of material across topics is fairly even in this text, but the amount of focus of certain material from certain geographic regions is most certainly not. I also couldn’t help but feel that the text might have been better if rather than focusing on so many disparate topics it focused on “hard history” so to speak more. I might even suggest that simply translating the biographies of certain individuals that they noted who lived in multiple dynasties and many years might have been more effective a venture at illustrating the events that happened across time and space within early medieval China.
Some novel work on say population estimates for the different dynasties via graphs, production of certain kinds of products in total at certain time periods and the like would have been helpful to understand the balance of power between the different states. This is my preference for bigger picture details like overall geopolitical and geostrategic speaking here though. The difference in certain types of food products and the like is explored, but not at as high a macroscopic level as I would have liked.
The text makes it easier to grasp the cultural split between the north and south in multiple arenas: From funerary documents to certain festivals and types of foodstuffs.
Individuals who dislike poetry will probably not enjoy reading a good number of the chapters, as the importance of poetry, while naturally very high in the past, can’t cause modern men and women without an interest in it to feel the same enthusiasm that medieval people did. I’m one such individual, although ironically, I found the historical context that the enthusiasm for poetry and the social mobility that being skilled at it produced fascinating and interesting to think about. Ladders for social mobility are a fascinating and important mechanism for societies, and the explanation of poetry, pure conversation, and other means by which families gained wealth and improved their station were a pleasure to learn about.
In regards to the religious material that was examined: If someone isn’t well versed in Buddhism and religious Daoism, those texts might seem very confusing to them and I’m not sure this text does a particularly good job at explaining some of these texts in a way that doesn’t force the reader to flip back and forth between the main body and the footnotes.
I was familiar with and enjoyed Robert Ford Campany’s work before reading this sourcebook, and was a little disappointed that the essay he wrote about the history of minor things/weird accounts was the same essay in many regards as that which I’ve read in the introductory pages to numerous collections of the Strange Accounts genre. That won’t be a problem for everyone who reads this text though.
I found the writer pointing out “It is equally certain that people living before this era had experienced self-awareness as unique individuals.” extremely odd. Perhaps I’m missing what they mean, but the mundane reality of human beings existing as individual biological entities makes this an insipid observation. I’m somewhat confused by the claim that this period is regarded as the “Rise of Individualism” in China.
Individualism as an intellectual movement of the Medieval period does not seem to me to be extraordinary or a break from previous eras in Chinese history. Even in the Analects it's noted that Kongfuzi’s disciple came across hermits who wished to avoid the problems of the world. Zhuangzi notes that the turtle dragging its tail through the mud is happier than the sacrificial turtle when he declines office. There seems to me to be a clear and present continuity between the hermits of the past and “present” of the early medieval period so I don’t quite grasp the reason that it seems like they’re trying to make it seem like something unique happened during this time period.
Overall, while the point of a sourcebook like this is to sort of cover a wide breadth, I think it might have benefited from concentration on being a sourcebook on some particular topic: Political system (of the different dynasties), social mobility (in different dynasties) or whatever topic. In contrast to a Sourcebook like the Wing Tsit-Chin Sourcebook on Chinese philosophy this text feels a little unfocused and not “deep enough” even though I’m aware it isn’t supposed to be, I still don’t like it.
November 2, 2015
A dense but important work of scholarship for those of us interested in this period of Chinese history.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews