Description
Book SynopsisThe heart of Urbanization in Early and Medieval China consists of translations of three gazetteers written during the Han (206 BCE220 CE), Tang (618907), and Northern Song (9601126) dynasties describing the city of Suzhou. The texts allow the reader to trace the dramatic changes that occurred as the city experienced enormous political and social upheavals over nine centuries. Each translation is accompanied by extensive annotation and a detailed discussion of the historical background of the text, authorship, and publication history. The book also traces the development of the gazetteer genre, the history of urban planning in China, and what we know about the early development of Suzhou from other texts and archaeological research. Urbanization in Early and Medieval China will be useful not only to scholars of Chinese history, but to scholars studying architecture and urban planning as well.
Trade Review"Urbanization in Early and Medieval China has done a significant service to the field by making available a much-needed new set of Suzhou-focused texts for historians, literary scholars, and cultural geographers of early and medieval China. For those of us who teach seminars on Chinese cities past of present, this book will provide ample productive reading material with which to provoke discussion, along with texts with which to launch research projects—at any level."
-- Linda Rui Feng * China Review International: A Journal of Reviews of Scholarly Literature in Chinese Studies *
"The most important contribution of this book by far is the excellent translation of these three gaz-etteers. Far too much of Chinese history is written from the perspective of the imperial court, which presented a centralizing, homogenizing imperial narrative that exaggerated the cultural, ethnic, and political unity across the imperial realm. Gazetteers such as these provide an alternative vision of the empire, describing instead a patchwork of regional variation wherein locals took pan-imperial elite culture and blended it, each in their own way, with unique local customs, local cults, and multiethnic demographics."
* Journal of the American Oriental Society *
Table of ContentsIllustrations
A Note on Nomenclature
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chronology of Chinese Dynasties
Introduction
Three Gazetteers of Suzhou
Tales of the Lands of Wu
Records of the Lands of Wu
Supplementary Records to the “Illustrated Guide to Wu Commandery”
Commentary
Analysis and Comparisons
Conclusion
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
