Chinese Books - Page 12

Records of the Historian: Chapters from the Shih Chi of Ssu-ma Ch'ien (Columbia Asian Studies)

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Forest Recollections: Wandering Monks in Twentieth-Century Thailand

Kamala Tiyavanich

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Editorial Review:

During the first half of this century the forests of Thailand were home to wandering ascetic monks. They were Buddhists, but their brand of Buddhism did not copy the practices described in ancient doctrinal texts. Their Buddhism found expression in living day-to-day in the forest and in contending with the mental and physical challenges of hunger, pain, fear, and desire. Combining interviews and biographies with an exhaustive knowledge of archival materials and a wide reading of ephemeral popular literature, Kamala Tiyavanich documents the monastic lives of three generations of forest-dwelling ascetics and challenges the stereotype of state-centric Thai Buddhism. Although the tradition of wandering forest ascetics has disappeared, a victim of Thailand's relentless modernization and rampant deforestation, the lives of the monks presented here are a testament to the rich diversity of regional Buddhist traditions. The study of these monastic lineages and practices enriches our understanding of Buddhism in Thailand and elsewhere.

Donors of Longmen: Faith, Politics, And Patronage in Medieval Chinese Buddhist Sculpture

Amy McNair

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Donors of Longmen is the first work in a Western language to recreate the history of the Longmen Grottoes, one of China's great stone sculpture treasure houses. Longmen, a UNESCO World Heritage site located near the old capital of Luoyang in modern Henan Province, consists of thousands of ancient cave chapels and shrines containing Buddhist icons of all sizes that were carved into the towering limestone cliffs from the fifth to the eighth century. Beyond its superb sculpture, Longmen also preserves thousands of engraved dedicatory inscriptions by its donors, who included emperors and empresses, aristocrats, court eunuchs, artisans, monks, nuns, lay societies, female palace officials, male civil and military officials, and ordinary lay believers.

Based on wide reading of both Asian and Western-language scholarship and careful analysis of the architecture, epigraphy, and iconography of the site, Amy McNair provides a rich and detailed examination of the dynamics of faith, politics, and money at Longmen, beginning with the inception of the site at Guyang Grotto in 493 and concluding with the last major dated project, the forty-eight Amitabhas added to the Great Vairocana Image Shrine in 730. Believers sponsored statues and cave shrines as public acts of giving (dâna) and merit (karma) to generate social credit in the political realm and karmic merit in the spiritual. Although donors' choices of icons reveal the changes in Buddhist religious concerns over the 250-year life of the site, the discussions of expenditure in the dedicatory inscriptions reveal not only how much was spent, but also the rhetoric appropriate to the donor's station in life, gender, and the intended audience. McNair argues that donors made conscious decisions regarding the style of their sculptures--a lively interplay between native Chinese imagery and icons and styles of art from the Buddhist holy land of India--so as to imbue the images with meanings that were immediately comprehensible to their contemporaries.

Through the her sensitive and well-informed exploration of Longmen's huge repository of remarkable early sculpture, McNair gives voice to a wide array of medieval believers, many of them traditionally excluded from history. Hers will be the definitive work on Longmen for years to come.

Grand Canal, Great River: The Travel Diary of a 12th Century Chinese Poet

Philip Watson

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Editorial Review:

The first modern translation of the travel diary of Lu You, a Chinese poet, politician and historian as he experienced the vast and diverse regions of China in the 12th Century.

Chinese Whispers: The Gladys Aylward story (Life Stories)

Carol Purves

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Gladys Aylward was a Londonborn missionary in China from the 1930s to the 1960s. Undeterred by criticism and contrary advice, she set off alone, trusting God to meet all her needs. Ostracized by the Chinese, and later wounded by the Japanese, she led 100 children to safety through the mountains. This is a compelling story of bravery and faith, of Gods strength in human weakness. Her story has become immortalized through the film The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, starring Ingrid Bergman. Retold here, this new biography incorporates original material which digs beneath the surface into some of the controversies that surrounded her life and work.

Their Hidden Agenda: The Story of a Chinese-American FBI Agent

Robert A. Woo, Sr.

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A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, a veteran of Vietnam, a special agent with the FBI for over twenty years - these are all descriptions of Robert Woo, Sr., and yet the FBI, in its misguided attempts to protect the nation, will target this man and his father for the father's homeland, China, and eventually destroy all that Robert worked for. This tell-all book not only explains what happened to Mr. Woo while employed by the FBI, but it is also a story that extols the human spirit. It is a personal journey of one man who spirals to the brink of despair to include compulsive gambling, thoughts of suicide, and loss of his job and pension, only to discover what is truly important in life: his belief in a Higher Power and his family.

The book journeys from his ancestors in China to his father's arrival in America, his time in the Navel Academy, his service in Vietnam, his career with the FBI, his subsequent job suspension, firing, his attempt to start over, and his ultimate redemption. It also provides Mr. Woo's insights into why he was fired, its connection to present-day scandals, the real reason he believes he was targeted and set up by the FBI, and what he believes from the vantage of an insider as to the problems facing the Agency in charge of national security.

Their Hidden Agenda: The Story of a Chinese-American FBI Agent is his story about what happened to him, although portions of the text have been redacted by the Agency involved.

Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service (A Philip E. Lilienthal Book in Asian studies)

Frederic Wakeman Jr.

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The most feared man in China, Dai Li, was chief of Chiang Kai-shek's secret service during World War II. This sweeping biography of "China's Himmler," based on recently opened intelligence archives, traces Dai's rise from obscurity as a rural hooligan and Green Gang blood-brother to commander of the paramilitary units of the Blue Shirts and of the dreaded Military Statistics Bureau: the world's largest spy and counterespionage organization of its time.
In addition to exposing the inner workings of the secret police, whose death squads, kidnappings, torture, and omnipresent surveillance terrorized critics of the Nationalist regime, Dai Li's personal story opens a unique window on the clandestine history of China's Republican period. This study uncovers the origins of the Cold War in the interactions of Chinese and American special services operatives who cooperated with Dai Li in the resistance to the Japanese invasion in the 1930s and who laid the groundwork for an ongoing alliance against the Communists during the revolution that followed in the 1940s. Frederic Wakeman Jr. illustrates how the anti-Communist activities Dai Li led altered the balance of power within the Chinese Communist Party, setting the stage for Mao Zedong's rise to supremacy. He reveals a complex and remarkable personality that masked a dark presence in modern China--one that still pervades the secret services on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
Wakeman masterfully illuminates a previously little-understood world as he discloses the details of Chinese secret service trade-craft. Anyone interested in the development of modern espionage will be intrigued by Spymaster, which spells out in detail the ways in which the Chinese used their own traditional methods, in addition to adapting foreign ways, to create a modern intelligence service.

The Doctor Who Was Followed by Ghosts: The Family Saga of a Chinese Woman Doctor

Li Qunying, Louis Han

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Hard to Put Down 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Having just returned from China I found this book very interesting. I find it hard to believe that China has made so many advances in such a short time.

Editorial Review:

A Communist doctor of great dedication, Li Qunying undoubtedly had fewer ghosts behind her than others, yet her life was in many ways ill-fated as she struggled to exist through vast political turmoil—the Anti-Japanese War, the Civil War, the Korean War, and the notorious Cultural Revolution. The Great Leap Forward Movement tragically took away her son Bingbing's life, and the persecution of her husband during the Cultural Revolution took a serious toll on his health, ultimately leading to his early death. Besides enduring personal misfortune, Qunying also witnessed the suffering of the peasants, who were the majority of the population at the grass-roots level and whose sorrowful stories have rarely been shared. Told from a uniquely female perspective, this haunting memoir interweaves eyewitness history, folklore, and superstition to tell a truly compelling tale.

Transcending Turmoil: Painting at the Close of China's Empire, 1796-1911

Claudia Brown, Ju-Hsi Chou

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Ezra Pound's Chinese Friends: Stories in Letters

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Editorial Review:

No literary figure of the past century - in America or perhaps in any other Western country - is comparable to Ezra Pound in the scope and depth of his exchange with China. To this day, scholars and students still find it puzzling that this influential poet spent a lifetime incorporating Chinese language, literature, history, and philosophy into Anglo-American modernism. How well did Pound know Chinese? Was he guided exclusively by eighteenth to nineteenth-century orientalists in his various Chinese projects? Did he seek guidance from Chinese peers? Those who have written about Pound and China have failed to address this fundamental question. No one could do so just a few years ago when the letters Pound wrote to his Chinese friends were sealed or had not been found. This book brings together 162 revealing letters between Pound and nine Chinese intellectuals, eighty-five of them newly opened up and none previously printed. Accompanied by editorial introductions and notes, these selected letters make available for the first time the forgotten stories of Pound and his Chinese friends. They illuminate a dimension in Pound's career that has been neglected: his dynamic interaction with people from China over a span of forty-five years from 1914 until 1959. This selection will also be a documentary record of a leading modernist's unparalleled efforts to pursue what he saw as the best of China, including both his stumbles and his triumphs.