Describes the occupations, pleasures, clothes, food, art, and social and civic life of the people in the city of Hangchow.

This important study explores the multifaceted Mongol experience in China, past and present. Combining insights from anthropology, history, and postcolonial criticism, Uradyn Bulag avoids romanticizing Mongols either as pacified primitive Other or as gallant resistance fighters. Rather, he portrays them as a people whose communist background and standing in China's northern borderlands has informed their political efforts to harness or confront Chinese nationalistic and political hegemony. Breaking new ground in the study of Chinese and Mongol history and ethnicity, the author offers a fresh interpretation of China viewed from the perspective of its peripheries, and of minority nationalities in relation to the study of Chinese representation and minority self-representation. The author interrogates received wisdom about Chinese and minority nationalism by unraveling the Chinese discourse and practice of 'national unity.' He shows how the discourse was constructed over time through political rituals and sexuality in relation to Mongols and other non-Chinese peoples that hark back to Chinese-Xiongnu confrontations two millennia ago and Manchu conquest in the 17th and 18th centuries. Titular rulers of an autonomous region in which they constitute a minority, Mongols face enormous barriers in building and maintaining a socialist Mongolian nationality and a Mongolian language and culture. Acknowledging these difficulties, Bulag discusses a range of sensitive issues including the imbrication of nation, class, and ethnicity in the context of Mongol-Chinese relations, tensions inherent in writing a postrevolutionary history for a socialist nationality, and the moral dilemma of building a socialist model with Mongol characteristics. Charting the interface between a state-centered multinational Chinese polity and a primordial nationalist multiculturalism that aims to manage minority nationalities as 'cultures,' he explores Mongol ethnopolitical strategies to preserve their heritage.

During the thirteenth century, the Mongols created the greatest empire in human history. Genghis Khan and his successors brought death and destruction to Eurasia. They obliterated infrastructure, devastated cities, and exterminated peoples. They also created courts in China, Persia, and southern Russia, famed throughout the world as centers of wealth, learning, power, religion, and lavish spectacle. The great Mongol houses established standards by which future rulers in Eurasia would measure themselves for centuries. In this ambitious study, David M. Robinson traces how in the late fourteenth century the newly established Ming dynasty (1368-1644) in China crafted a narrative of the fallen Mongol empire. To shape the perceptions and actions of audiences at home and abroad, the Ming court tailored its narrative of the Mongols to prove that it was the rightful successor to the Mongol empire. This is a story of how politicians exploit historical memory for their own gain.

Rise of the Mongols offers readers a selection of five important works that detail the rise of the Mongol Empire through Chinese eyes. Three of these works were written by officials of South China's Southern Song dynasty and two are from officials from North China writing in the service of the Mongol rulers. Together, these accounts offer a view of the early Mongol Empire very different not just from those of Muslim and Christian travelers and chroniclers, but also from the Mongol tradition embodied in The Secret History of Mongols. The five Chinese source texts (in English translation, each with their own preface): Selections from Random Notes from Court and Country since the Jianyan Years, vol.2, by Li Xinchuan"A Memorandum on the Mong-Tatars," by Zhao Gong"A Sketch of the Black Tatars," by Peng Daya and Xu Ting"Spirit-Path Stele for His Honor Yelü, Director of the Secretariat," by Song Zizhen"Notes on a Journey," by Zhang Dehui Also included are an introduction, index, bibliography, and appendices covering notes on the texts, tables and charts, and a glossary of Chinese and transcribed terms.

Pre-modern critical interactions of nature and society can best be studied during the so-called "Crisis of the 14th Century". While historiography has long ignored the environmental framing of historcial processes and scientists have over-emphasized nature's impact on the course of human history, this volume tries to describe the at times complex modes of the late-medieval relationship of man and nature. The idea of 'teleconnection', borrowed from the geosciences, describes the influence of atmospheric circulation patterns often over long distances. It seems that there were 'teleconnections' in society, too. So this volumes aims to examine man-environment interactions mainly in the 14th century from all over Europe and beyond. It integrates contributions from different disciplines on impact, perception and reaction of environmental change and natural extreme events on late Medieval societies. For humanists from all historical disciplines it offers an approach how to integrate written and even scientific evidence on environmental change in established and new fields of historical research. For scientists it demonstrates the contributions scholars from the humanities can provide for discussion on past environmental changes.

Encompassing history, politics, religion, and art, this collection of essays on Chinese civilization under the Mongols challenges the previously held views that Mongol rule had only negative consequences. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Mongol Century explores the visual world of China's Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), the spectacular but relatively short-lived regime founded by Khubilai Khan, regarded as the pre-eminent khanate of the Mongol empire. This book illuminates the Yuan era – full of conflicts and complex interactions between Mongol power and Chinese heritage – by delving into the visual history of its culture, considering how Mongol governance and values imposed a new order on China's culture and how a sedentary, agrarian China posed specific challenges to the Mongols' militarist and nomadic lifestyle. Shane McCausland explores how an unusual range of expectations and pressures were placed on Yuan culture: the idea that visual culture could create cohesion across a diverse yet hierarchical society, while balancing Mongol desires for novelty and display with Chinese concerns about posterity. Although in recent years exhibitions have begun to open up the inherent paradoxes of Yuan culture, this is the first book in English to adopt a comprehensive approach. It incorporates a broad range of visual media of the East Asia region to reconsider the impact Mongol culture had in China, from urban architecture and design to tomb murals and porcelain, and from calligraphy and printed paper money to stone sculpture. Fresh and invigorating, The Mongol Century explores, in fascinating detail, the visual culture of this brief but captivating era of East Asian history.