Historians of science and Sinologists have long needed a unified narrative to describe the Chinese development of modern science, medicine, and technology since 1600. They welcomed the appearance in 2005 of Benjamin Elman's masterwork, On Their Own Terms. Now Elman has retold the story of the Jesuit impact on late imperial China, circa 1600-1800, and the Protestant era in early modern China from the 1840s to 1900 in a concise and accessible form ideal for the classroom. This coherent account of the emergence of modern science in China places that emergence in historical context for both general students of modern science and specialists of China.

Today, more than eighty of North America's most prestigious institutions have established East Asian libraries or collections. Their combined holdings number in excess of 16 million books in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, with more than 350,000 items being added every year. The wealth of this material provides an invaluable resource for the study of Asia. This history of acquisition provides remarkable insight into our cultural legacies. This book offers a vibrant and fascinating look at the development of twenty-five major East Asian libraries in North America and the pioneers who helped shape them.

Only recently has the enormous literary output of women writers of the Ming and Qing periods (1368-1911) been rediscovered. Through these valuable texts, we apprehend in ways not possible earlier the complexity of women’s experiences in the inner quarters and their varied responses to challenges facing state and society. Writing in many genres, women engaged with topics as varied as war, travel, illness, love, friendship, female heroism, and religion. Drawing on a library of newly digitized resources, this volume's eleven chapters describe, analyze, and theorize these materials. They question previous assumptions about women’s lives and abilities, open up new critical space in Chinese literary history and offer new perspectives on China’s culture and society. “This volume rewrites the history of Chinese women’s literature by taking a truly inter-disciplinary (instead of merely multi-disciplinary) approach. In so doing, it ends up illuminating the centrality of writing women to the social, political, and intellectual lives of the Chinese empire from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.” Prof. Dorothy Ko, Barnard College, Columbia University, author of Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (California, 2005).

Sometime before 1579, Zhou Lujing, a professional writer living in a bustling commercial town in southeastern China, published a series of lavishly illustrated books, which constituted the first multigenre painting manuals in Chinese history. Their popularity was immediate and their contents and format were widely reprinted and disseminated in a number of contemporary publications. Focusing on Zhou's work, Art by the Book describes how such publications accommodated the cultural taste and demands of the general public, and shows how painting manuals functioned as a form in which everything from icons of popular culture to graphic or literary cliche was presented to both gratify and shape the sensibilities of a growing reading public. As a special commodity of early modern China, when cultural standing was measured by a person's command of literati taste and lore, painting manuals provided nonelite readers with a device for enhancing social capital.

Patrons and Patriarchs breaks new ground in the study of clergy-court relations during the tumultuous period that spanned the collapse of the Tang dynasty (618–907) and the consolidation of the Northern Song (960–1127). This era, known as the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, has typically been characterized as a time of debilitating violence and instability, but it also brought increased economic prosperity, regional development, and political autonomy to southern territories. The book describes how the formation of new states in southeastern China elevated local Buddhist traditions and moved Chan (Zen) monks from the margins to the center of Chinese society. Drawing on biographies, inscriptions, private histories, and government records, it argues that the shift in imperial patronage from a diverse array of Buddhist clerics to members of specific Chan lineages was driven by political, social, and geographical reorientations set in motion by the collapse of the Tang dynasty and the consolidation of regional powers during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. As monastic communities representing diverse arrays of thought, practice, and pedagogy allied with rival political factions, the outcome of power struggles determined which clerical networks assumed positions of power and which doctrines were enshrined as orthodoxy. Rather than view the ascent of Chan monks and their traditions as instances of intellectual hegemony, this book focuses on the larger sociopolitical processes that lifted members of Chan lineages onto the imperial stage. Against the historical backdrop of the tenth century, Patrons and Patriarchs explores the nature and function of Chan lineage systems, the relationships between monastic and lay families, and the place of patronage in establishing identity and authority in monastic movements.

A linguistic and historical study of the Manchu script in the early modern world Manchu was a language first written down as part of the Qing state-building project in Northeast Asia in the early seventeenth century. After the Qing invasion of China in 1644, and for the next two and a half centuries, Manchu was the language of state in one of the early modern world's great powers. Its prominence and novelty attracted the interest of not only Chinese literati but also foreign scholars. Yet scholars in Europe and Japan, and occasionally even within China itself, were compelled to study the language without access to a native speaker. Jesuit missionaries in Beijing sent Chinese books on Manchu to Europe, where scholars struggled to represent it in an alphabet compatible with Western pedagogy and printing technology. In southern China, meanwhile, an isolated phonologist with access to Jesuit books relied on expositions of the Roman alphabet to make sense of the Manchu script. When Chinese textbooks and dictionaries of Manchu eventually reached Japan, scholars there used their knowledge of Dutch to understand Manchu. In The Early Modern Travels of Manchu, Mårten Söderblom Saarela focuses on outsiders both within and beyond the Qing empire who had little interaction with Manchu speakers but took an interest in the strange, new language of a rising world power. He shows how—through observation, inference, and reference to received ideas on language and writing—intellectuals in southern China, Russia, France, Chosŏn Korea, and Tokugawa Japan deciphered the Manchu script and explores the uses to which it was put for recording sounds and arranging words.