This book examines the formation of the Chinese empire through its reorganization and reinterpretation of its basic spatial units: the human body, the household, the city, the region, and the world. The central theme of the book is the way all these forms of ordered space were reshaped by the project of unification and how, at the same time, that unification was constrained and limited by the necessary survival of the units on which it was based. Consequently, as Mark Edward Lewis shows, each level of spatial organization could achieve order and meaning only within an encompassing, superior whole: the body within the household, the household within the lineage and state, the city within the region, and the region within the world empire, while each level still contained within itself the smaller units from which it was formed. The unity that was the empire's highest goal avoided collapse back into the original chaos of nondistinction only by preserving within itself the very divisions on the basis of family or region that it claimed to transcend.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

This work explores the many factors underlying the extended popularity of the cliff tomb, a local burial form in the Sichuan Basin in China during the Eastern Han dynasty (AD 25-220).

Volume 117 of the Proceedings of the British Academy contains 13 lectures delivered at the British Academy in 2001.

Describes the Chinese Bronze Age, including the development of the Chinese state, writing, religion and architecture.

In his interpretation of the earliest surviving major monuments of Buddhist art in China, Caswell (fine arts, U. of British Columbia) points at important distinctions between the first five caves and all the others. Contrary to most art historians, he argues that the first caves were political statements while the others were mainly expressions of religious piety. Acidic paper. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR