Origins of Chinese Festivals (Rev)


Book Description

This book on the origins of the festivals and popular stories associated with them will help the reader to appreciate how the celebration of these festivals acted as a social glue in identifying and helping the Chinese stick together as a race throughout their long history and wherever they are found.




Chinese Festivals


Book Description

Chinese Festivals provides an illustrated introduction to China's traditional festivals, firmly established as part of China's rich, diverse culture.




Chinese Feasts & Festivals


Book Description

This beautifully illustrated Chinese cookbook features all the most popular feast and festival food along with a wealth information. It is often said that the Chinese live to eat. Happily for them, the rich culinary tradition of China is largely inspired by a calendar year filled with a generous round of joyous occasions--festivals, reunions, weddings and anniversaries--for eating, drinking and making merry. And, of course, for paying homage to the gods and ancestors. Food, fittingly, is a combination of flavors and symbols (wealth, happiness, luck, prosperity), a spiritual celebration and an earthly pleasure. Chinese Feasts & Festivals, S.C. Moey has assembled a number of facts and fancies as well as a collection of festival specialties for the Chinese food lover to read and enjoy or, if the spirit takes flight, cook up a feast that will impress both mortals and ancestors and win the approval of the gods. Authentic Chinese recipes include: Drunken Chicken Steamed Duck with Bamboo Shoots Five Spice Rolls Spicy Sichuanese Lamb Sweet and Sour Fish Chinese Lettuce Leaf Cups Yangzhou Fried Rice Sweet Red Bean Pancakes Steamed Rice Flour Cupcakes New Years Cakes




The Story of China


Book Description

'A learned, wise, wonderfully written single volume history of a civilisation that I knew I should know more about' Tom Holland 'Masterful and engrossing...well-paced, eminently readable and well-timed. A must-read for those who want – and need – to know about the China of yesterday, today and tomorrow' Peter Frankopan China’s story is extraordinarily rich and dramatic. Now Michael Wood, one of the UK's pre-eminent historians, brings it all together in a major new one-volume history of China that is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand its burgeoning role in our world today. China is the oldest living civilisation on earth, but its history is still surprisingly little known in the wider world. Michael Wood's sparkling narrative, which mingles the grand sweep with local and personal stories, woven together with the author’s own travel journals, is an enthralling account of China’s 4000-year-old tradition, taking in life stationed on the Great Wall or inside the Forbidden City. The story is enriched with the latest archaeological and documentary discoveries; correspondence and court cases going back to the Qin and Han dynasties; family letters from soldiers in the real-life Terracotta Army; stories from Silk Road merchants and Buddhist travellers, along with memoirs and diaries of emperors, poets and peasants. In the modern era, the book is full of new insights, with the electrifying manifestos of the feminist revolutionaries Qiu Jin and He Zhen, extraordinary eye-witness accounts of the Japanese invasion, the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution under Chairman Mao, and fascinating newly published sources for the great turning points in China’s modern history, including the Tiananmen Square crisis of 1989, and the new order of President Xi Jinping. A compelling portrait of a single civilisation over an immense period of time, the book is full of intimate detail and colourful voices, taking us from the desolate Mongolian steppes to the ultra-modern world of Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. It also asks what were the forces that have kept China together for so long? Why was China overtaken by the west after the 18th century? What lies behind China’s extraordinary rise today? The Story of China tells a thrilling story of intense drama, fabulous creativity and deep humanity; a portrait of a country that will be of the greatest importance to the world in the twenty-first century.




Mooncakes and Hungry Ghosts


Book Description

By Lt. General William E. Odom




Making an American Festival


Book Description

This provocative history of the largest annual Chinese celebration in the United States—the Chinese New Year parade and beauty pageant in San Francisco—opens a new window onto the evolution of one Chinese American community over the second half of the twentieth century. In a vividly detailed account that incorporates many different voices and perspectives, Chiou-ling Yeh explores the origins of these public events and charts how, from their beginning in 1953, they developed as a result of Chinese business community ties with American culture, business, and politics. What emerges is a fascinating picture of how an ethnic community shaped and was shaped by transnational and national politics, economics, ethnic movements, feminism, and queer activism.




Legendary Chinese Festivals


Book Description

Chinese culture and heritage is rich and runs across a time frame of five thousand years. It was during this time that a variety of unique and varied celebrations began to grow roots. Despite China’s many changes Chinese festivals are deeply rooted in popular tradition. China amasses a vast area and consists of a number of ethnic groups that all come together as part of a vibrant cultural experience. Some of these festivals have developed into popular celebrations that are not only practiced in China, but also in many Chinese communities throughout the world. Much of the customs and traditions of its people vary by geography and ethnicity yet remain firmly established as part of the country’s vibrant culture. Over the years much of the festivals have evolved with the changes in the development of the Chinese civilization and as a consequence have become an integral part of the Chinese culture. As with time’s progression and the advent of science, technology and rapid globalisation many Chinese are no longer able to tell how their festivals originated which has in turn seen the gradual shedding of ethnic traditions for modern and universal ways. This is especially true of Chinese communities outside their homeland.




Becoming Taiwanese


Book Description

"What does it mean to be Taiwanese? This question sits at the heart of Taiwan’s modern history and its place in the world. In contrast to the prevailing scholarly focus on Taiwan after 1987, Becoming Taiwanese examines the important first era in the history of Taiwanese identity construction during the early twentieth century, in the place that served as the crucible for the formation of new identities: the northern port city of Jilong (Keelung). Part colonial urban social history, part exploration of the relationship between modern ethnicity and nationalism, Becoming Taiwanese offers new insights into ethnic identity formation. Evan Dawley examines how people from China’s southeastern coast became rooted in Taiwan; how the transfer to Japanese colonial rule established new contexts and relationships that promoted the formation of distinct urban, ethnic, and national identities; and how the so-called retrocession to China replicated earlier patterns and reinforced those same identities. Based on original research in Taiwan and Japan, and focused on the settings and practices of social organizations, religion, and social welfare, as well as the local elites who served as community gatekeepers, Becoming Taiwanese fundamentally challenges our understanding of what it means to be Taiwanese."




Revolutionary Bodies


Book Description

At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Revolutionary Bodies is the first English-language primary source–based history of concert dance in the People’s Republic of China. Combining over a decade of ethnographic and archival research, Emily Wilcox analyzes major dance works by Chinese choreographers staged over an eighty-year period from 1935 to 2015. Using previously unexamined film footage, photographic documentation, performance programs, and other historical and contemporary sources, Wilcox challenges the commonly accepted view that Soviet-inspired revolutionary ballets are the primary legacy of the socialist era in China’s dance field. The digital edition of this title includes nineteen embedded videos of selected dance works discussed by the author.




Origins of Chinese Science & Technology


Book Description

Examine and discover the intriguing legends and science underpinning the splendour of the ancient Chinese civilisation. Packed with information and vividly illustrated, this easy-to-read volume will greatly enhance your appreciation of Chinese science and technology.