229 research outputs found
The politics of fashion: perceptions of power in female clothing and ornamentation as reflected in the sixteenth-century Chinese novel Jin Ping Mei
This thesis examines issues of female power and influence in sixteenth-century China focusing on how women and their roles were perceived in the changing social environment of the mid-late Ming dynasty. Using aspects of a New Historicist approach, information from contemporary literary and historical sources are analysed alongside each other. With its emphasis on the lives of women and preoccupation with the description of material objects, the late Ming novel Jin Ping Mei forms an important element in the thesis. China in the sixteenth century saw expanding urbanisation, the emergence of a new wealthy merchant class, increasing visibility of women and a questioning of traditional morality. Fashion consciousness, as one of the most conspicuous aspects of the new material culture, is a possible indicator of these trends. Traditional Western theories contend that fashion began in the particular context of Renaissance Europe. However, this study argues that a similar fashion awareness existed in China too, and was manifested in a competitive striving for social status, in this case specifically among women. In contrast to previous studies which downplayed the impact women had on defining traditional Chinese culture, this thesis demonstrates how women and their sartorial choices began to redefine the boundaries of material culture, influencing literati discourse which, in turn, re- influenced female behaviour
Musical Inspirations from Tang Court Dance Nichang Yuyi in Liu Qing’s Fantasia of Chinese Ancient Dance for Two Pianos
Dr. Liu Qing’s Fantasia of Chinese Ancient Dance for two pianos (2011) stands as a notable contemporary Chinese piano composition that reinterprets the renowned court dance suite Nichang Yuyi (the dance of Rainbow-Colored Feather Garment) from the 8th century Tang Dynasty China. Drawing inspiration from the structure and the musical modal languages of the Tang court dance, as well as the descriptions from Tang poet Bai Juyi’s poem of Nichang, Liu Qing adeptly combined her knowledge of Chinese musical traditions with Western compositional techniques, introducing stylistic diversity to the piano duo scene through this captivating work of dance music. This dissertation addresses the need for more scholarly study in the English language on identifiable musicological information of the Tang court dance Nichang. Furthermore, it serves as a valuable resource for pianists interested in learning Liu Qing’s piano works and other Chinese contemporary works sharing similar musical characteristics. The conclusion of this dissertation is supported by a focused research on the current ethnomusicological study on the musical origins and characteristics of Nichang, a systematic study of the traditional Chinese modulation theories and the three traditional Chinese heptatonic modes, the Yayue, Qingyue, and Yanyue modes, and a comprehensive interview with the composer discussing her creative process and her thoughts on using elastic tempo and rubato, revealing their connections to the “slow singing with fast accompaniment” rhythmic feature commonly found in traditional Chinese operas
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Dressing for the Times: Fashion in Tang Dynasty China (618-907)
During the Tang dynasty, an increased capacity for change created a new value system predicated on the accumulation of wealth and the obsolescence of things that is best understood as fashion. Increased wealth among Tang elites was paralleled by a greater investment in clothes, which imbued clothes with new meaning. Intellectuals, who viewed heightened commercial activity and social mobility as symptomatic of an unstable society, found such profound changes in the vestimentary landscape unsettling. For them, a range of troubling developments, including crisis in the central government, deep suspicion of the newly empowered military and professional class, and anxiety about waste and obsolescence were all subsumed under the trope of fashionable dressing. The clamor of these intellectuals about the widespread desire to be "current" reveals the significant space fashion inhabited in the empire - a space that was repeatedly gendered female. This dissertation considers fashion as a system of social practices that is governed by material relations - a system that is also embroiled in the politics of the gendered self and the body. I demonstrate that this notion of fashion is the best way to understand the process through which competition for status and self-identification among elites gradually broke away from the imperial court and its system of official ranks. Out of status instability grew a desire for novelty that transformed the dressed body into an object for status display during the late eighth and ninth centuries. Sartorial savvy became a critical arena for the articulation of wealth and power by the old aristocracy and new military or professional elite alike. A foundational aim of my dissertation is to understand how fashion contributed to a new system for ordering the world in Tang dynasty China. By the ninth century, changes in the Tang economic and political structure enabled the rise of a new fashionable elite whose politics of appearance were driven more by the luxury silk economy than by the old symbolic order. I argue that the emergence of fashion was intimately related to developments in the silk industry, which not only reached record production levels during this period, but also manufactured fabrics that were unprecedented in design and complexity. The rise of private silk workshops in the latter half of the dynasty made silk more available to the new military and professional elites. As consumers of novel silks, these elites propelled the silk industry forward and with it, fashion. The new silk economy was personified in a popular literary trope of the ninth century: the impoverished weaving girl slaving away in the silk workshops as an icon of the damages engendered by the excessive consumption of luxury. With this project, I illustrate how the history of Tang fashion serves as an important prism into the workings of the Tang state, the productive lives of premodern women, and the formation of social and cultural identities during a dynamic period of world history. My approach is interdisciplinary, informed by economic history, art history, literature, and textile technology. To my analysis of Tang poetry, sumptuary laws, and economic treatises, I add careful examination of the visual representations of dress and a close study of the corpus of silk artifacts to map the transformations in sartorial practice. By the end of the dynasty, fashion had become a key part of a larger critique of the waning empire's economic landscape, the rise of a new military and professional elite, and the collapse of stable status displays. Involved in a nascent market system, tied to the building of new hierarchies, and implicated in structures of gender and cultural identity, the Tang fashion system was integral to these larger historical processes
Recommended from our members
Dressing for the Times: Fashion in Tang Dynasty China (618-907)
During the Tang dynasty, an increased capacity for change created a new value system predicated on the accumulation of wealth and the obsolescence of things that is best understood as fashion. Increased wealth among Tang elites was paralleled by a greater investment in clothes, which imbued clothes with new meaning. Intellectuals, who viewed heightened commercial activity and social mobility as symptomatic of an unstable society, found such profound changes in the vestimentary landscape unsettling. For them, a range of troubling developments, including crisis in the central government, deep suspicion of the newly empowered military and professional class, and anxiety about waste and obsolescence were all subsumed under the trope of fashionable dressing. The clamor of these intellectuals about the widespread desire to be "current" reveals the significant space fashion inhabited in the empire - a space that was repeatedly gendered female. This dissertation considers fashion as a system of social practices that is governed by material relations - a system that is also embroiled in the politics of the gendered self and the body. I demonstrate that this notion of fashion is the best way to understand the process through which competition for status and self-identification among elites gradually broke away from the imperial court and its system of official ranks. Out of status instability grew a desire for novelty that transformed the dressed body into an object for status display during the late eighth and ninth centuries. Sartorial savvy became a critical arena for the articulation of wealth and power by the old aristocracy and new military or professional elite alike. A foundational aim of my dissertation is to understand how fashion contributed to a new system for ordering the world in Tang dynasty China. By the ninth century, changes in the Tang economic and political structure enabled the rise of a new fashionable elite whose politics of appearance were driven more by the luxury silk economy than by the old symbolic order. I argue that the emergence of fashion was intimately related to developments in the silk industry, which not only reached record production levels during this period, but also manufactured fabrics that were unprecedented in design and complexity. The rise of private silk workshops in the latter half of the dynasty made silk more available to the new military and professional elites. As consumers of novel silks, these elites propelled the silk industry forward and with it, fashion. The new silk economy was personified in a popular literary trope of the ninth century: the impoverished weaving girl slaving away in the silk workshops as an icon of the damages engendered by the excessive consumption of luxury. With this project, I illustrate how the history of Tang fashion serves as an important prism into the workings of the Tang state, the productive lives of premodern women, and the formation of social and cultural identities during a dynamic period of world history. My approach is interdisciplinary, informed by economic history, art history, literature, and textile technology. To my analysis of Tang poetry, sumptuary laws, and economic treatises, I add careful examination of the visual representations of dress and a close study of the corpus of silk artifacts to map the transformations in sartorial practice. By the end of the dynasty, fashion had become a key part of a larger critique of the waning empire's economic landscape, the rise of a new military and professional elite, and the collapse of stable status displays. Involved in a nascent market system, tied to the building of new hierarchies, and implicated in structures of gender and cultural identity, the Tang fashion system was integral to these larger historical processes
Jōjin’s Travels in Northern Song China: Performances of Place in the Travel Diary A Record of a Pilgrimage to Tiantai and Wutai Mountains
abstract: In 1072 JĹŤjin (1011-1081) boarded a Chinese merchant ship docked in Kabeshima (modern Saga) headed for Mingzhou (modern Ningbo) on the eastern coast of Northern Song (960-1279) China. Following the convention of his predecessors, JĹŤjin kept a daily record of his travels from the time he first boarded the Chinese merchant ship in Kabeshima to the day he sent his diary back to Japan with his disciples in 1073.
Jōjin’s diary in eight fascicles, A Record of a Pilgrimage to Tiantai and Wutai Mountains (San Tendai Godaisan ki), is one of the longest extant travel accounts concerning medieval China. It includes a detailed compendium of anecdotes on material culture, flora and fauna, water travel, and bureaucratic procedures during the Northern Song, as well as the transcription of official documents, inscriptions, Chinese texts, and lists of personal purchases and official procurements. The encyclopedic nature of Jōjin’s diary is highly valued for the insight it provides into the daily life, court policies, and religious institutions of eleventh-century China. This dissertation addresses these aspects of the diary, but does so from the perspective of treating the written text as a material artifact of placemaking.
The introductory chapter first contextualizes Jōjin’s diary within the travel writing genre, and then presents the theoretical framework for approaching Jōjin’s engagement with space and place. Chapter two presents the bustling urban life in Hangzhou in terms of Jōjin’s visual and material consumption of the secular realm as reflected in his highly illustrative descriptions of the night markets and entertainers. Chapter three examines Jōjin’s descriptions of sacred Tendai sites in China, and how he approaches these spaces with a sense of familiarity from the textual milieu that informed his movements across this religious landscape. Chapter four discusses Jōjin’s impressions of Kaifeng and the Grand Interior as a metropolitan space with dynamic functions and meanings. Lastly, chapter five concludes by considering the means by which Jōjin’s performance of place in his diary further contributes to the collective memory of place and his own sense of self across the text.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation East Asian Languages and Civilizations 201
Jōjin’s Travels in Northern Song China: Performances of Place in the Travel Diary A Record of a Pilgrimage to Tiantai and Wutai Mountains
abstract: In 1072 JĹŤjin (1011-1081) boarded a Chinese merchant ship docked in Kabeshima (modern Saga) headed for Mingzhou (modern Ningbo) on the eastern coast of Northern Song (960-1279) China. Following the convention of his predecessors, JĹŤjin kept a daily record of his travels from the time he first boarded the Chinese merchant ship in Kabeshima to the day he sent his diary back to Japan with his disciples in 1073.
Jōjin’s diary in eight fascicles, A Record of a Pilgrimage to Tiantai and Wutai Mountains (San Tendai Godaisan ki), is one of the longest extant travel accounts concerning medieval China. It includes a detailed compendium of anecdotes on material culture, flora and fauna, water travel, and bureaucratic procedures during the Northern Song, as well as the transcription of official documents, inscriptions, Chinese texts, and lists of personal purchases and official procurements. The encyclopedic nature of Jōjin’s diary is highly valued for the insight it provides into the daily life, court policies, and religious institutions of eleventh-century China. This dissertation addresses these aspects of the diary, but does so from the perspective of treating the written text as a material artifact of placemaking.
The introductory chapter first contextualizes Jōjin’s diary within the travel writing genre, and then presents the theoretical framework for approaching Jōjin’s engagement with space and place. Chapter two presents the bustling urban life in Hangzhou in terms of Jōjin’s visual and material consumption of the secular realm as reflected in his highly illustrative descriptions of the night markets and entertainers. Chapter three examines Jōjin’s descriptions of sacred Tendai sites in China, and how he approaches these spaces with a sense of familiarity from the textual milieu that informed his movements across this religious landscape. Chapter four discusses Jōjin’s impressions of Kaifeng and the Grand Interior as a metropolitan space with dynamic functions and meanings. Lastly, chapter five concludes by considering the means by which Jōjin’s performance of place in his diary further contributes to the collective memory of place and his own sense of self across the text.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation East Asian Languages and Civilizations 201
The Unified Three Teachings in the Rock Carvings of the Song Dynasty in Chongqing and Sichuan
The paper deals with the unified three teachings, Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, in the Rock Carvings from the Song time in the ancient Sichuan region
Buddhist Encounters and Identities Across East Asia
Buddhist Encounters and Identities across East Asia offers a fascinating picture of the intricacies of regional and cross-regional networks and the complexity of Buddhist identities emerging across Asia.; Readership: All those interested in the history of Buddhism in East Asia and in East Asian Buddhist cultural practices, and anyone with an interest in the diffusion and transformation of Buddhism
Buddhist Encounters and Identities Across East Asia
Buddhist Encounters and Identities across East Asia offers a fascinating picture of the intricacies of regional and cross-regional networks and the complexity of Buddhist identities emerging across Asia.; Readership: All those interested in the history of Buddhism in East Asia and in East Asian Buddhist cultural practices, and anyone with an interest in the diffusion and transformation of Buddhism
Li Bo Unkempt
"This is Li Bo. You may also know him as Li Po 李白 (701–62), the great poet of Tang China, master of swoop and soar, wanderer, man of wine, so enamored of the moon that he tried to embrace her reflection in the river, fell from his boat and drowned. Favorite of the Emperor—but only for a while, as such energies cannot be long contained at Court.
Li Bo Unkempt presents seventy of his verses, a few letters, some rhapsodies and songs. They dance all through Tang high culture, inhabited by planets, hermit women, swashbucklers, grottos, calligraphers and buffoons, Li Bo’s friends, lovers and alter egos. He’s too shy, too quick to make introductions, but this volume allows us to hear the poetry's stories, their temperaments, to glimpse their secret economies of exchange. The book also offers background material, brief essays, a kind of Lonely Planet™ guidebook to this extraordinary realm. This way the strange will become familiar, and only then can we appreciate how truly strange it is.
The authors and translators regard these poems as magical acts. What is offered, then, in this volume, are multiple ways to realize that magic. The essays are demonstrations, a spell-book, an extension of this non-ordinary knowing. Things too delicate to be said directly. So the book proceeds by analogy, by juxtaposition, latency, innuendo, jump cuts, dialetheia and flirt. All this a way to understand a deeper claim: that Li Bo is an immortal.
And what might that be...?
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