A renowned historian captures a critical moment in Chinese history Zhang Dai is recognized as one of the finest historians and essayists of China's Ming dynasty. When he was born into a wealthy family in 1597, the Ming dynasty had been in place for 229 years. Zhang's early life was marked by the expansive sense of progress that permeated Ming culture: the flourishing of reformist schools of Buddhism; wide-scale philanthropy; the education of women; a celebration of the visual arts, writing, and music; intellectual pursuit ...
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A renowned historian captures a critical moment in Chinese history Zhang Dai is recognized as one of the finest historians and essayists of China's Ming dynasty. When he was born into a wealthy family in 1597, the Ming dynasty had been in place for 229 years. Zhang's early life was marked by the expansive sense of progress that permeated Ming culture: the flourishing of reformist schools of Buddhism; wide-scale philanthropy; the education of women; a celebration of the visual arts, writing, and music; intellectual pursuit of medicine and science?this was truly a time of cultural creativity and renaissance in China. When the Ming dynasty was overthrown in the Manchu invasion of 1644, Zhang Dai's family lost their fortune and their way of life. Zhang Dai fled to the countryside, where, as a writer of tremendous skill, acuity, and passion, he spent his final forty years recounting his previous life as a way of leaving a legacy to his children and rebuilding a spirit shattered by the violent upheaval he had witnessed. Celebrated China scholar Jonathan Spence has pored over Zhang Dai's extraordinary documents and vividly brings to life seventeenth-century China. This absorbing book illuminates a culture's transformation and reveals how China's history affects its place in the world today.
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Seller's Description:
This is an ex-library book and may have the usual library/used-book markings inside. This book has hardback covers. Clean from markings. In good all round condition. Dust jacket in good condition. Please note the Image in this listing is a stock photo and may not match the covers of the actual item, 550grams, ISBN: 9780670063574.
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May have some shelf-wear due to normal use. Your purchase funds free job training and education in the greater Seattle area. Thank you for supporting Goodwill's nonprofit mission!
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Near Fine in Near Fine jacket. New York: Viking, September 2007. Hardcover. Book Club Edition. Near Fine b ook in a Near Fine jacket. Interior pristine. Spine straight and very tight; tail slightly bumped. Jacket clean and bright with slight shelfwear to bo ttom edge. Not from a library. No remainder mark. Not clipped. xviii + 332 pages. Zhang Dai (1597-1689), subject of this absorbing and evocative literary-biographical study, was a Chinese essayist and historian whose long life bridged the conquest of China by the Manchus and the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644. The upheaval inspired him to write a history of the Ming as well as personal recollections of his youth, which Spence mines for insights into the culture of this period. Zhang's reminiscences about his earlier life as a well-to-do scholar and aesthete are full of poetic reveries--a treasured blend of tea, evening lanterns in his hometown of Shaoxing, an exquisite courtesan, plum blossoms in the moonlight--which contrast with his later circumstances of poverty, coarse food and wizened, querulous concubines. The memoirs are studded with biographical sketches of his vast extended family, a gallery of eccentrics whose lives furnish handy illustrations of moral precepts. They also open a window on the social world of the late Ming scholarly caste, whose lives revolved around eternal cramming for the examinations that controlled entrée into the imperial bureaucracy; Zhang's father was 53 when he finally passed and was able to get his first job. Through Zhang's Proustian sensibility, Spence retrieves a portrait of a civilization imbued with esoteric obsessions as well as sensuality.
This fascinating biography of a Ming Dynasty
member of an elite family, during the time of the collapse of the Ming and the establishment of the Manchu Ching Dynasty,
introduces a man interesting in his own right.
Even more intriguing is the detailed background of life in 17th Century China--the economy, agriculture, food, trade, literature, and anything one can imagine about a culture so different in time and location from our own.