This is a multi-author volume resulted from an international conference focusing on topics related to our understanding of the role of China in the global history. Apart from introductory chapters exploring methodological issues and providing big pictures of framing China in the world in particular time zones, this volume also covers rich discussions on the following themes from the ancient period to the twentieth century: organized water transport, cultural interactions, navigators, port cities, smuggling activities, customs service, foreign relations, migration, and diasporas. Written by scholars of different generations who are based in diverse regions including Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, the UK and the US, the chapters in this volume either address old questions from new perspectives, or table new topics that were largely ignored in previous scholarship. Some go further to brainstorm possible research directions in the future. This thought-provoking volume will be beneficial to readers who are interested in rethinking China's position in the global historical stage against the backdrop of Post-Orientalism.

This is a multi-author volume resulted from an international conference focusing on topics related to our understanding of the role of China in the global history. Apart from introductory chapters exploring methodological issues and providing big pictures of framing China in the world in particular time zones, this volume also covers rich discussions on the following themes from the ancient period to the twentieth century: organized water transport, cultural interactions, navigators, port cities, smuggling activities, customs service, foreign relations, migration, and diasporas. Written by scholars of different generations who are based in diverse regions including Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, the UK and the US, the chapters in this volume either address old questions from new perspectives, or table new topics that were largely ignored in previous scholarship. Some go further to brainstorm possible research directions in the future. This thought-provoking volume will be beneficial to readers who are interested in rethinking China's position in the global historical stage against the backdrop of Post-Orientalism.

Zheng He’s Maritime Voyages (1405-1433) and China’s Relations with the Indian Ocean World: A Multilingual Bibliography provides a multidisciplinary guide to publications on this great navigator’s activities and their impact on Chinese and world history. Admiral Zheng He commanded the fifteenth-century world’s largest fleet. In the course of seven voyages made between 1405 and 1433, his massive ships visited over thirty present-day countries in Asia and Africa. Those voyages reflected and reinforced the development of complex networks of trade, migration, cultural exchange, and political interactions between China and the Indian Ocean world. This bibliography lists sources in thirteen languages, including both scholarly studies and popular works like Gavin Menzies’s controversial bestsellers claiming the Chinese sailed around the world before Columbus. Relevant translations, transliterations and annotations are provided to aid the reader.

The book investigates China’s relations to the outside world between ca. 100 BCE and 1800 CE. In contrast to most histories of the Silk Roads, the focus of this book clearly lies on the maritime Silk Road and on the period between Tang and high Qing, selecting aspects that have so far been neglected in research on the history of China’s relations with the outside world. The author examines, for example, issue of 'imperialism' in imperial China, the specific role of fanbing 蕃兵 (frontier tribal troops) during Song times, the interrelationship between maritime commerce, military expansion, and environmental factors during the Yuan, the question of whether or not early Ming China can be considered a (proto-)colonialist country, the role force and violence played during the Zheng He expeditions, and the significance the Asia-Pacific world possessed for late Ming and early Qing rulers.

This rich and enjoyable book by the acclaimed author of Japan Story explores the many ways in which Asia has influenced Europe and North America over centuries of tangled, dynamic encounters From the time of the ancient Greeks onwards the West's relationship with Asia consisted for the most part of outrageous tales of strange beasts and monsters, of silk and spices shipped over vast distances and an uneasy sense of unknowable empires fantastically far away. By the twentieth century much of Asia might have come under Western rule after centuries of warfare, but its intellectual, artistic and spiritual influence was fighting back. The Light of Asia is a wonderfully varied and entertaining history of the many ways in which Asia has shaped European and North American culture over centuries of tangled, dynamic encounters, and the central importance of this vexed, often confused relationship. From Marco Polo onwards Asia has been both a source of genuine fascination and equally genuine failures of comprehension. China, India and Japan were all acknowledged to be both great civilizations and in crude ways seen as superseded by the West. From Chicago to Calcutta, and from antiquity to the new millennium, this is a rich, involving story of misunderstandings and sincere connection, of inspiration and falsehood, of geniuses, adventurers and con-men. Christopher Harding's captivating gallery of people and places celebrates Asia's impact on the West in all its variety.

Bringing Forth the New provides a headlong introduction into the world of Chinese contemporary visual art, opening from the art world onto the political, technological and economic vectors of recent Chinese history. Each chapter reads an important facet of recent Chinese history through the work of a significant artist. From examining trade war and intellectual property through the work of political pop painters such as Yu Youhan, to the development of gendered constructs in China through the work of Cui Xuiwen.

This volume explores the mutually transformative relations between migrants and port cities. Throughout the ages of sail and steam, port cities served as nodes of long-distance transmissions and exchanges. Commercial goods, people, animals, seeds, bacteria and viruses; technological and scientific knowledge and fashions all arrived in, and moved through, these microcosms of the global. Migrants made vital contributions to the construction of the urban-maritime world in terms of the built environment, the particular sociocultural milieu, and contemporary representations of these spaces. Port cities, in turn, conditioned the lives of these mobile people, be they seafarers, traders, passers-through, or people in search of a new home. By focusing on migrants—their actions and how they were acted upon—the authors seek to capture the contradictions and complexities that characterized port cities: mobility and immobility, acceptance and rejection, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, diversity and homogeneity, segregation and interaction. The book offers a wide geographical perspective, covering port cities on three continents. Its chapters deal with agency in a widened sense, considering the activities of individuals and collectives as well as the decisive impact of sailing and steamboats, trains, the built environment, goods or microbes in shaping urban-maritime spaces.