Search results for ""Author Jian Yuan""

As key nodes that connected ancient silk routes traversing China, Japan and India, trading hubs, towns and cities in Java and Sumatra and other places in Asia were key destination points for merchants, monks and other itinerants plying these routes.Recent archaeological excavations in countries bordering the South China Sea and around the Indian Ocean unveiled remarkable similarities in artifacts recovered both on land and from the sea. The similarities underlined the many facets of regional exchanges and cross-cultural influences among people and places in these networks. Some of the findings indicate a distinct Chinese presence in the commercial, social and religious activities of these early Asian trading posts.This book collects papers from the symposium on Ancient Silk Trade Routes — Cross Cultural Exchanges and Their Legacies in Asia. It explores several threads arising from this regional exchange of goods and ideas, in particular, the cross-cultural dimensions of the exchanges in the areas of textile trade, ceramic routes, trading hubs, arts and artifacts and Buddhism.

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There are highly fragmented urban wildernesses remaining and scattering in rapidly urbanised and exceedingly industrialised cities, ranging from crevices along sidewalks to large areas of isolated forests. Although differing in scales with the natural wilderness, urban wildernesses see similar community structures and often offer similar services, with strong vitality and resilience. However, such natural resources are often misunderstood or overlooked as undesirable places and thus, their great ecological, social, economic, and aesthetic values are ignored. Meanwhile, due to constant changes of global and regional ecological environments, lagged design theories and techniques, and limited aesthetic consciousness, urban plantscapes—the most important producer with provisioning and regulating services for both urban wildernesses and constructed ecosystems—are confronting problems such as poor species and structural diversity, high maintenance requirements, and insufficient ecosystem services. This issue hopes to interpret and display the treasured qualities of urban wildernesses and inspire landscape architects to strike the balance between urban wildernesses and human settlements via ecological planting methods that facilitate natural evolution and ecological flows. Landscape Architecture Frontiers attempts to define an “urban wilderness” and its images, connotations, implications, and resources; explore related techniques to provide full play to its irreplaceable role in providing ecosystem services such as biodiversity conservation; and focus on urban re-wilding practices and ecological planting theories, aiming at well integrating urban wildernesses into the naturally constructed urban ecosystem to enhance the city’s ecological sustainability and resilience.

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