Environmental features of Chinese architectural heritage: the standardization of form in the pursuit of equilibrium with nature

We present a scientific discussion about Chinese historical architecture and cultural paradigms in order to analyze the formation of building patterns objectively connected to environmental features. In this regard, we will demonstrate the process of standardization from architectural modules related in different levels of composition around “voids”, onto cosmological urban tissues in harmony with nature. The conclusions show that we can only understand Chinese architectural patterns in relation to Dào or nature, and in turn, they possess profound social and environmental values from which we receive useful lessons to advance towards sustainability in architecture and urban planning. The authors believe that it is critical for China and the world to find a new approach to the building construction industry with an ecological and philosophical background recognizable as “Chinese” and based in its own past. In order to support the information provided in the first part of the article, the authors have conducted an environmental analysis of the traditional Chinese urban layout whose results greatly confirm the initial hypotheses, i.e. the historical fashion of constructing neighborhoods improves conditions of the town in terms of comfort and is able to save energy, thus reducing pernicious change effects

Cultural evolution in Vietnam’s early 20th century: a Bayesian networks analysis of Franco-Chinese house designs

The study of cultural evolution has taken on an increasingly interdisciplinary and diverse approach in explicating phenomena of cultural transmission and adoptions. Inspired by this computational movement, this study uses Bayesian networks analysis, combining both the frequentist and the Hamiltonian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach, to investigate the highly representative elements in the cultural evolution of a Vietnamese city’s architecture in the early 20th century. With a focus on the façade design of 68 old houses in Hanoi’s Old Quarter (based on 78 data lines extracted from 248 photos), the study argues that it is plausible to look at the aesthetics, architecture, and designs of the house façade to find traces of cultural evolution in Vietnam, which went through more than six decades of French colonization and centuries of sociocultural influence from China. The in-depth technical analysis, though refuting the presumed model on the probabilistic dependency among the variables, yields several results, the most notable of which is the strong influence of Buddhism over the decorations of the house façade. Particularly, in the top 5 networks with the best Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) scores and p\u3c0.05, the variable for decorations (DC) always has a direct probabilistic dependency on the variable B for Buddhism. The paper then checks the robustness of these models using Hamiltonian MCMC method and find the posterior distributions of the models’ coefficients all satisfy the technical requirement. Finally, this study suggests integrating Bayesian statistics in the social sciences in general and for the study of cultural evolution and architectural transformation in particular

Content mining and visualization of traditional genealogies of China – Deployed on the genealogy of Wu's in Gaoqian, Zhejiang

Facing the elite figures in the traditional genealogy of China, this paper advocates that the traditional genealogy archives should be transformed into multi-dimensional resources by means of combining historical and humanistic analysis with digital technologies in order to analyze and display the family elite culture. This paper takes the genealogy of Wu's from Zhejiang Province of China as the research material, and constructs the genealogy ontology, in order to reveal the trend of digitalization of traditional genealogy research. This paper constructs the concept system and relationships of the genealogy ontology, and takes Wu Shilai, the ancestor of the 23rd generation of Wu's, as an example to realize the visualization of Chinese traditional genealogy. The significance of the visualization of traditional genealogy archives in "the construction of new rural talents' and "the construction of family heritage' is put forward

Daoing Medicine: Practice Theory for Considering Religion and Medicine in Early Imperial China

This article is a critique of the neologism “Daoist medicine” (daojiao yixue 道教醫學) that has recently entered scholarly discourse in China. It provides evidence that this expression is an anachronism which found its way into scholarly discourse in 1995 and has now become so widely used that it is seen as representing an undisputed “historical fact.” It demonstrates that the term has no precursor in the pre-modern record, and critiques two substantive attempts to set up “Daoist medicine” as an analytical term. It reviews earlier scholarship on Daoism and medicine, or healing, within the larger context of religion and medicine, and shows how attention has shifted, particularly in relation to the notion of overlap or intersection of these historical fields of study. It proposes that earlier frameworks grounded in epistemology or simple social identity do not effectively represent the complexity of these therapies. Practice theory, on the other hand, provides a useful analytic for unpacking the organisation and transmission of curing knowledge. Such an approach foregrounds the processes and dynamics of assemblage, rather than theoretical abstractions. The article concludes by proposing a focus on the Daoing of medicine, that is, the variety of processes by which therapies come to be known as Daoist, rather than imposing an anachronistic concept like Daoist medicine

Antiquity in the history of music: A critical review of the music textbooks for secondary education in Spain

The article is protected by copyright and reuse is restricted to non-commercial and no derivative usesThe history of music is shaped through narratives that sometimes contain a number of issues regarding cultural stereotypes, historiographic approaches, Eurocentrism or colonialism. For this reason, its transmission and the way it is taught must be the object of study and careful consideration. The present research analyses – on the basis of narratological and organological premises – the contents that shape the discourses underlying the coverage of the ancient period by music education textbooks used in the Spanish compulsory secondary education stage. To this effect, an ad hoc instrument was designed and implemented on 24 coursebooks. The results confirmed that the chronological narrative is the most widely used strategy and that in more than half of the textbooks under examination the history of music begins to be told after Antiquity. Other findings were that the construct of the ‘foundational’ civilisations of the West is still perpetuated and that an organological narrative is proposed which is inspired by a diffusionist approach. In conclusion, we detect patterns that are controversial and need to be subjected to revision at a time when educational textbooks are a decisive resource that adapts the official curriculum and mediates between the latter and music education teacher

The Maritime Silk Road

The Maritime Silk Road foregrounds the numerous networks that have been woven across oceanic geographies, tying world regions together often far more extensively than land-based routes. On the strength of the new data which has emerged in the last two decades in the form of archaeological findings, as well as new techniques such as GIS modeling, the authors collectively demonstrate the existence of a very early global maritime trade. From architecture to cuisine, and language to clothing, evidence points to early connections both within Asia and between Asia and other continents—well before European explorations of the Global South. The human stories presented here offer insights into both the extent and limits of this global exchange, showing how goods and people traveled vast distances, how they were embedded in regional networks, and how local cultures were shaped as a result

Chinese Annals in the Western Observatory

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of documents of all sorts have been unearthed in China, opening whole new fields of study and transforming our modern understanding of ancient China. While these discoveries have necessarily taken place in China, Western scholars have also contributed to the study of these documents throughout this entire period. This book provides a comprehensive survey of the contributions of these Western scholars to the field of Chinese paleography, and especially to study of oracle-bone inscriptions, bronze and stone inscriptions, and manuscripts written on bamboo and silk. Each of these topics is provided with a comprehensive narrative history of studies by Western scholars, as well as an exhaustive bibliography and biographies of important scholars in the field. It is also supplied with a list of Chinese translations of these studies, as well as a complete index of authors and their works. Whether the reader is interested in the history of ancient China, ancient Chinese paleographic documents, or just in the history of the study of China as it has developed in the West, this book provides one of the most complete accounts available to date

The conceptual compression of space and time as intimated in the depiction of the horse in China, circa 1250 BCE-CE 400.

This dissertation examines the horse in ancient China, from before its domestication in the 13th century BCE to the fourth century CE. The revolutionary utilization of the mounted horse influenced contemporary concepts of time and space. The topics include the history of equid domestication in Eurasia, horse-drawn vehicles and riding, the introduction of the horse-drawn chariot from Shang China to its decline in Eastern Zhou; the rise of cavalry in China in the fourth century BCE; and the administrative, martial, symbolic and religious roles given the horse up to the Han dynasty; the early Chinese world view as dictated by space and geography, and how the horse came to help to expand that world; early concepts of time and how they evolved up to the Han; changes in the rendition of the horse from the Late Shang to the post-Han periods, an evolution which reflected and echoed changes in perceptions of time, speed and duration. The evidence provided by this research into the art, language, historical sources and philosophical writings support the writer\u27s conclusion that the horse, as a revolutionary technological mechanism of communication and war, was instrumental in the formation of empire, and that the horse, due to its inherent characteristics of speed and power, came to expressed, through its artistic renderings, in writing and language, as embodying a vector for change, in bringing distant provinces and new conquests closer together in the temporal sense, by breaking down barriers of time and space, and that the horse became the ideal vehicle upon which the deceased could travel to the world beyond death