Statesman or warlord? Yuan Shikai (1859–1916) has been both hailed as China’s George Washington for his role in the country’s transition from empire to republic and condemned as a counter-revolutionary. In any list of significant modern Chinese figures, he stands in the first rank. Yet Yuan Shikai: A Reappraisal sheds new light on the controversial history of this talented administrator, fearsome general, and enthusiastic modernizer. Due to his death during the civil war his actions provoked, much Chinese historiography portrays Yuan as a traitor, a usurper, and a villain. After toppling the last emperor of China, Yuan endeavoured to build dictatorial power and establish his own dynasty while serving as the first president of the new republic, eventually going so far as to declare himself emperor. Drawing on previously untapped primary sources and recent scholarship, Patrick Fuliang Shan offers a lucid, comprehensive, and critical new interpretation of Yuan’s part in shaping modern China.

Chinese poetry has a long history of interaction with the visual arts. Classical aesthetic thought held that painting, calligraphy, and poetry were cross-fertilizing and mutually enriching. What happened when the Chinese poetic tradition encountered photography, a transformative technology and presumably realistic medium that reshaped seeing and representing the world? Shengqing Wu explores how the new medium of photography was transformed by Chinese aesthetic culture. She details the complex negotiations between poetry and photography in the late Qing and early Republican eras, examining the ways traditional textual forms collaborated with the new visual culture. Drawing on extensive archival research into illustrated magazines, poetry collections, and vintage photographs, Photo Poetics analyzes a wide range of practices and genres, including self-representation in portrait photography; gifts of inscribed photographs; mass-media circulation of images of beautiful women; and photography of ghosts, immortals, and imagined landscapes. Wu argues that the Chinese lyrical tradition provided rich resources for artistic creativity, self-expression, and embodied experience in the face of an increasingly technological and image-oriented society. An interdisciplinary study spanning literary studies, visual culture, and media history, Photo Poetics is an original account of media culture in early twentieth-century China and the formation of Chinese literary and visual modernities.

The Chinese Hsinhai Revolution explores and explains for the first time the important role of G. E. Morrison in great power diplomacy in China from the end of the Russo-Japanese War to the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty. The work is based on a wide range of multinational scholarly sources and in order to develop the context in which Morrison carried out his personal diplomacy and to delineate the many-sided story into which Morrison has to be placed, Woodhouse has in addition to mining the very rich Morrison collection, drawn upon British, Japanese and American personal and official materials.

First Published in 2005, but published originally in 1938 on the eve of the Second World War, this work focuses on the last member of a distinguished group of genros, or elder statesmen, who participated in the wars of the Meiji restoration and in 1889 under Emperor Meiji, drew up the Imperial Constitution on which the Japanese political system was based. Prince Saionji was the president of the Privy Council, the second president of the Seyukai party, twice Prime Minster and Japan's Chief Delegate to the Paris Peace Conference.