What is design in modern China? And what are the ecological stakes in understanding how modern Chinese design encourages us to see? This book takes up these questions though exploration into the work of three famous designers who were actively engaged with the natural sciences in early twentieth-century Shanghai, Canton, and Beijing. The designed objects asking for heightened vision into interior and exterior worlds make their way across temporal and cultural boundaries. This book, then, is also about that movement, and the emotions of the eye which support it. Porcelain dishes, textiles, magazine covers, and paintings moved the people who lived with them a century ago in China to an awareness of their edges, rims, borders as boundary lines, and to see things through those in-between forms from a new point of view; to share pleasure in colour and pattern, perhaps, but also to connect to other deeply transformative feelings at the boundary. The book will be of interest to scholars working in design history, art history, and Chinese studies.

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.

The first of its kind, this collection of critical essays opens up new venues in the comparative study of science and culture by focusing on the formative decades of modern China in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. It provides a wide-ranging examination of the cultural and intellectual history of science and technology in modern China.From anti-imperialism to the technology of Chinese writing, the commodification of novelties to the rise of the modern professional scientist, new lexica and appropriations of the past, the contributors map out a transregional and global circuitry of modern knowledge and practical know-how, nationalism and the amalgamation of new social practices. Contributors include: Iwo Amelung, Fa-ti Fan, Shen Guowei, Danian Hu, Joachim Kurtz, Eugenia Lean, Thomas S. Mullaney, Hugh Shapiro, Grace Shen, and Jing Tsu.

China today is never out of the news: from human rights controversies and the continued legacy of Tiananmen Square, to global coverage of the Beijing Olympics, and the Chinese 'economic miracle'. It seems a country of contradictions: a peasant society with some of the world's most futuristic cities, heir to an ancient civilization that is still trying to find a modern identity. This Very Short Introduction offers the reader with no previous knowledge of China a variety of ways to understand the world's most populous nation, giving a short, integrated picture of modern Chinese society, culture, economy, politics and art. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

What is design in modern China? And what are the ecological stakes in understanding how modern Chinese design encourages us to see? This book takes up these questions though exploration into the work of three famous designers who were actively engaged with the natural sciences in early twentieth-century Shanghai, Canton, and Beijing. The designed objects asking for heightened vision into interior and exterior worlds make their way across temporal and cultural boundaries. This book, then, is also about that movement, and the emotions of the eye which support it. Porcelain dishes, textiles, magazine covers, and paintings moved the people who lived with them a century ago in China to an awareness of their edges, rims, borders as boundary lines, and to see things through those in-between forms from a new point of view; to share pleasure in color and pattern, perhaps, but also to connect to other deeply transformative feelings at the boundary. The book will be of interest to scholars working in design history, art history, and Chinese studies.

Provides a new perspective on the Chinese avant-garde through the figure of artist and activist Tian Han