Computing Lens for Exploring the Historical People's Social Network

A typical social research topic is to figure out the influential people's relationship and its weights. It is very tedious for social scientists to solve those problems by studying massive literature. Digital humanities bring a new way to a social subject. In this paper, we propose a framework for social scientists to find out ancient figures' power and their camp. The core of our framework consists of signed graph model and novel group partition algorithm. We validate and verify our solution by China Biographical Database Project (CBDB) dataset. The analytic results on a case study demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, which gets information that consists with the literature's facts and social scientists' viewpoints.Comment: accepted at SoNet 201

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...?

Buddhist translation practices in Medieval China: the case of the Buddhacarita

The aim of the present work is to provide a philological analysis of the Fo suoxing zan 佛所行讚, the Medieval Chinese translation of the Sanskrit poem Buddhacarita, the poetic account of the life of the Buddha composed in Sanskrit by the poet Aśvaghoṣa in the late first or early second century CE. The Buddhacarita defines itself as a mahākāvya, a work of ornate poetry; it belongs to the genre of the sargabandha, i.e. a collection of chapters (sarga) linked together (bandha) in a story. The Chinese translation of the Buddhacarita was completed in the first half of the fifth century CE in the capital of the Liu Song (420-479) dynasty; it is now listed as T192 in the Taishō edition of the Chinese Buddhist Canon. The critical edition of the Buddhacarita was published by Edward Hamilton Johnston in 1936; it includes the first fourteen chapters of the poem, covering the life of the Buddha up to the enlightenment. The Fo suoxing zan is made up of twenty-eight chapters, covering the life of the Buddha from his birth to the partition of his relics – similar characteristics are shared by the Tibetan translation, completed in the 11th century. Since the Chinese and the Tibetan versions are the same length, it is generally understood that Aśvaghoṣa’s poem was originally made up of twenty-eight chapters. If we consider the importance and the literary value of the Buddhacarita, the earliest complete account on the life of the Buddha in Sanskrit composed with an explicit aesthetic purpose, it is understandable that early scholarly works mostly used the Chinese and Tibetan versions as tools to edit and to reconstruct the Sanskrit manuscript. In the long term, however, this attitude led to the underestimation of the importance of the Chinese translation of the Buddhacarita and of its influence on other texts in the Chinese Buddhist Canon. This study reverses this perspective and aims to describe the peculiarities and the historical context in which the Fo suoxing zan was produced. The present work derives further conclusions from a comparison between the Fo suoxing zan and the Buddhacarita. The main hypothesis is that the discrepancies between the Fo suoxing zan and the “original” Sanskrit poem can reveal interesting details on the circumstances in which monk-translators carried out their duty

Making the Palace Machine Work

This volume brings the studies of institutions, labour, and material cultures to bear on the history of science and technology by tracing the workings of the Imperial Household Department (Neiwufu) in the Qing court and empire. An enormous apparatus that employed 22,000 men and women at its heyday, the Department operated a "machine" with myriad moving parts. The first part of the book portrays the people who kept it running, from technical experts to menial servants, and scrutinises the paper trails they left behind. Part two uncovers the working principles of the machine by following the production chains of some of its most splendid products: gilded statues, jade, porcelain, and textiles. Part three tackles the most complex task of all, managing living organisms in nature, including lotus plants grown in imperial ponds in Beijing, fresh medicines sourced from disparate regions, and tribute elephants from Southeast Asia

A Modern Encounter betweeen Chinese Buddhism and Periodical Publishing

This thesis contends that the encounter between Chinese Buddhism and the periodical publication industry played a crucial part in the reform and transformation of Buddhism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China. By delineating Buddhism’s initial encounter with modern print technology and the subsequent development of Buddhist periodical publications, this thesis highlights the ways in which the monastic community used modern print technology to spread the voice of Buddhism in this era of drastic social change. Buddhist print culture also serves to illustrate another historical reality often neglected when studying modern Chinese Buddhism: the initiative of the Buddhist monastic order to participate in social transformation as well as Buddhist reform by combating the continuing degradation caused by national and ideological crises. Taking prominent Buddhist monks such as Zongyang, Yinguang, and Taixu as examples of various manners of engaging with periodical publication, this thesis reveals the different strategies implemented by the Buddhist sangha and the mixed attitudes they held toward modern communication techniques. The thesis ends by discussing advertisements printed in early twentieth-century Buddhist periodicals, which present a picture of a prosperous, active, and vivified—but not unified—Buddhist community which not only served its own members but also adapted to a changing social environment that incentivized proposals for both reform and preservation of Chinese Buddhism

Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine

The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine is an extensive, interdisciplinary guide to the nature of traditional medicine and healing in the Chinese cultural region, and its plural epistemologies. Established experts and the next generation of scholars interpret the ways in which Chinese medicine has been understood and portrayed from the beginning of the empire (third century BCE) to the globalisation of Chinese products and practices in the present day, taking in subjects from ancient medical writings to therapeutic movement, to talismans for healing and traditional medicines that have inspired global solutions to contemporary epidemics. The volume is divided into seven parts: Longue Durée and Formation of Institutions and Traditions Sickness and Healing Food and Sex Spiritual and Orthodox Religious Practices The World of Sinographic Medicine Wider Diasporas Negotiating Modernity This handbook therefore introduces the broad range of ideas and techniques that comprise pre-modern medicine in China, and the historiographical and ethnographic approaches that have illuminated them. It will prove a useful resource to students and scholars of Chinese studies, and the history of medicine and anthropology. It will also be of interest to practitioners, patients and specialists wishing to refresh their knowledge with the latest developments in the field. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 licens

Communication, Empire, and Authority in the Qing Gazette

This dissertation studies the political and cultural roles of official information and political news in late imperial China. Using a wide-ranging selection of archival, library, and digitized sources from libraries and archives in East Asia, Europe, and the United States, this project investigates the production, regulation, and reading of the Peking Gazette (dibao, jingbao), a distinctive communications channel and news publication of the Qing Empire (1644-1912). Although court gazettes were composed of official documents and communications, the Qing state frequently contracted with commercial copyists and printers in publishing and distributing them. As this dissertation shows, even as the Qing state viewed information control and dissemination as a strategic concern, it also permitted the free circulation of a huge variety of timely political news. Readers including both officials and non-officials used the gazette in order to compare judicial rulings, assess military campaigns, and follow court politics and scandals. As the first full-length study of the Qing gazette, this project shows concretely that the gazette was a powerful factor in late imperial Chinese politics and culture, and analyzes the close relationship between information and imperial practice in the Qing Empire. By arguing that the ubiquitous gazette was the most important link between the Qing state and the densely connected information society of late imperial China, this project overturns assumptions that underestimate the importance of court gazettes and the extent of popular interest in political news in Chinese history. Through engagement with previously unstudied gazettes, manuscripts, and diaries, the project demonstrates that political news and information derived from court gazettes influenced both individual encounters with the state and, more broadly, the evolution of administrative practice in the Qing Empire. In so doing, this project connects scholarship in the emerging field of information history with work on Qing political institutions, print culture, and the history of newspapers. The project highlights the encounters of readers, publishers, and administrators with gazettes in order to illustrate the complexity and richness of information practices in a non-Western early modern context. In addition to demonstrating that court gazettes are important and underutilized sources for the study of Qing history, this project’s findings should encourage scholars of information and the state in other global contexts to investigate popular encounters with the state through the lens of news and information. In five thematic chapters, the project undertakes a multidimensional study of the role of the gazette in the Qing court, territorial bureaucracy, and empire. The first chapter explores the evolution of Qing information policy from the Qing conquest through the empire’s decline in the nineteenth century. The second chapter establishes a detailed history of the evolution of the gazette industry and its relationship to the growth of commercial publishing in late imperial Beijing. The third chapter provides evidence for how readers engaged with the gazette in their daily lives and careers. The fourth chapter examines how the gazette found a place in newspapers published in China and around the world, and posits that gazette information shaped the stories that could be read about China, especially in the nineteenth century. Finally, the fifth chapter looks at efforts to reconceive the gazette at the end of the Qing as representative of ongoing elite-led efforts to remake relationships between print and politics in a modernizing state

Conversion by the Book

In this dissertation I argue that print culture acted as a catalyst for change among Buddhists in modern China. Through examining major publication institutions, publishing projects, and their managers and contributors from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s, I show that the expansion of the scope and variety of printed works, as well as new the social structures surrounding publishing, substantially impacted the activity of Chinese Buddhists. In doing so I hope to contribute to ongoing discussions of the ?revival? of Chinese Buddhism in the modern period, and demonstrate that publishing, propelled by new print technologies and new forms of social organization, was a key field of interaction and communication for religious actors during this era, one that helped make possible the introduction and adoption of new forms of religious thought and practice

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