Victor H. Mair

Erling Hoh

A lively, illustrated history of the ubiquitous beverage takes readers from the jungles of Southeast Asia through the decadent Tang and Song dynasties to explore tea's role in art, religion, trade, and other arenas, in an upbeat account that also covers a range of lesser-known facts, from Morocco's adoption of green tea as a national beverage and the source of the billabong in "Waltzing Matilda."

The True History of Tea

The significance of Japanese-language scholarship on China cannot be overstated. Yet much of it is largely untapped by China scholars in both the West and China, in part because they are unfamiliar with the Japanese pronunciation of Chinese characters. Even those who know Japanese are frequently frustrated when seeking an obscure reading of a personal or place name. The purpose of this volume is to enable Sinologists and others involved in Chinese studies to access entries in Japanese reference works dealing with China without going through the time-consuming process of looking up characters by radical and stroke. For users of this dictionary, it is a simple matter to find a character by looking it up by its alphabetical pinyin pronunciation. Having located it, the user can go directly to the item in Japanese reference works. The Dictionary includes more than 13,072 entries not only in Chinese characters and their Sino-Japanese (ondoku/onyomi) readings, but also the Japanese (kundoku/kunyomi) readings. The romanized Japanese readings will assist in correctly transcribing Japanese names, such as the names of Japanese publishers and authors, and the technical terms employed by Japanese in their writings on China. These features will also give those familiar with pinyin greater access to material on Japanese history and culture. The ABC Dictionary of Sino-Japanese Readings will be a boon to Sinologists and others interested in the study of China.

ABC Dictionary of Sino-Japanese Readings

Comprehensive yet portable, this account of the development of Chinese literature from the very beginning up to the present brings the riches of this august literary tradition into focus for the general reader. Organized chronologically with thematic chapters interspersed, the fifty-five original chapters by leading specialists cover all genres and periods of poetry, prose, fiction, and drama, with a special focus on such subjects as popular culture, the impact of religion upon literature, the role of women, and relationships with non-Sinitic languages and peoples.

The Columbia History of Chinese Literature

Mark Bender

In The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature, two of the world's leading sinologists, Victor H. Mair and Mark Bender, capture the breadth of China's oral-based literary heritage. This collection presents works drawn from the large body of oral literature of many of China's recognized ethnic groups?including the Han, Yi, Miao, Tu, Daur, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Kazak?and the selections include a variety of genres. Chapters cover folk stories, songs, rituals, and drama, as well as epic traditions and professional storytelling, and feature both familiar and little-known texts, from the story of the woman warrior Hua Mulan to the love stories of urban storytellers in the Yangtze delta, the shaman rituals of the Manchu, and a trickster tale of the Daur people from the forests of the northeast. The Cannibal Grandmother of the Yi and other strange creatures and characters unsettle accepted notions of Chinese fable and literary form. Readers are introduced to antiphonal songs of the Zhuang and the Dong, who live among the fantastic limestone hills of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region; work and matchmaking songs of the mountain-dwelling She of Fujian province; and saltwater songs of the Cantonese-speaking boat people of Hong Kong. The editors feature the Mongolian epic poems of Geser Khan and Jangar; the sad tale of the Qeo family girl, from the Tu people of Gansu and Qinghai provinces; and local plays known as "rice sprouts" from Hebei province. These fascinating juxtapositions invite comparisons among cultures, styles, and genres, and expert translations preserve the individual character of each thrillingly imaginative work.

The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature

This is the most comprehensive study of pien-wen (“transformation texts” i.e., tales of metamorphosis) in any language since the manuscripts were discovered at the beginning of the 20th century in a remote cave complex in northwest China. They are the earliest written vernacular narratives in China and are thus extremely important in the history of Chinese language and literature. Numerous scholarly controversies have surrounded the study of the texts in the last three quarters of a century; this volume seeks to resolve some of them—the extent, origins, and formal characteristics of the texts, the meaning of pien wen, the identity of the authors who composed these popular narratives and the scribes who copied them, the relationship of the texts to oral performance, and the reasons for the apparently sudden demise of the genre around the beginning of the Sung dynasty. This is a multi-disciplinary study that integrates findings from religious, literary, linguistic, sociological, and historical materials, carried out with intellectual rigor. It includes an extensive bibliography of relevant sources in many languages.

A Study of the Buddhist Contribution to the Rise of Vernacular Fiction and Drama in China

Tang Transformation Texts

In this extraordinary work of scholarship, Victor Mair traces the global development over a thousand years of a genre of popular Buddhist folk literature from China known as pien-wen, pointing out its origins in India as a form of oral storytelling using painting as an aid, and showing how that form has influenced performance and literary traditions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Central Asia, the near East, Italy, France, and Germany. Professor Mair's research has important implications for students and scholars of literature, folklore, painting, religion, history, art, and theater and the performing arts, not to mention Chinese popular culture and Indian civilization.

Chinese Picture Recitation and Its Indian Genesis

Painting and Performance

An exquisite book featuring uniquely formated Chinese texts enhanced by woodcuts, plastercuts, and calligraphy. Each translation is preceded by an introduction providing useful background analysis as well as relevant textual and bibliographical references. Facing pages give elaborate and thorough annotations and commentaries, including lexical, phonological, and philological information useful to specialists.

Chʿiu Jih Teng Hung Fu Tʿeng Wang Ko Chien Pieh Hsü

This is the remarkable story of tea and its uses from ancient times to the present. The narrative takes the reader from the jungles of Southeast Asia to the splendour of the Tang and Song Dynasties in China, from the tea ceremony aesthetics of medieval Japan to the fabled tea and horse trade of Central Asia, from the advent of Britains love affair with tea to the tea party that sparked the American Revolution. Throughout the centuries, tea has inspired artists, enhanced religious experience, played a pivotal role in the emergence of world trade, and helped trigger major wars. No other drink has touched the lives of so many people in so many different ways. The True History of Tea brings all these disparate strands together in an erudite tale full of quirky facts and unexpected byways, celebrating the common heritage of a beverage we have all come to love.

Paul R. Goldin

Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt

The Hawai‘i Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture is a collection of more than ninety primary sources—all but a few of which were translated specifically for this volume—of cultural significance from the Bronze Age to the turn of the twentieth century. They take into account virtually every aspect of traditional culture, including sources from the non-Sinitic ethnic minorities.

Hawai‘i Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture

Presents empirical evidence on a wide range of cultural phenomena in history, and thereby demonstrating the processes whereby cultural traits are acquired and modified - the dynamics of transmission and transformation. This book pays attention to biological organisms on the one hand and to developments spanning an entire continent on the other.

Contact And Exchange in the Ancient World

A lively and beautifully illustrated history of one of the world's favorite beverages and its uses through the ages. World-renowned sinologist Victor H. Mair teams up with journalist Erling Hoh to tell the story of this remarkable beverage and its uses, from ancient times to the present, from East to West. For the first time in a popular history of tea, the Chinese, Japanese, Tibetan, and Mongolian annals have been thoroughly consulted and carefully sifted. The resulting narrative takes the reader from the jungles of Southeast Asia to the splendor of the Tang and Song Dynasties, from the tea ceremony politics of medieval Japan to the fabled tea and horse trade of Central Asia and the arrival of the first European vessels in Far Eastern waters. Through the centuries, tea has inspired artists, enhanced religious experience, played a pivotal role in the emergence of world trade, and triggered cataclysmic events that altered the course of humankind. How did green tea become the national beverage of Morocco? And who was the beautiful Emma Hart, immortalized by George Romney in his painting The Tea-maker of Edgware Road? No other drink has touched the daily lives of so many people in so many different ways. The True History of Tea brings these disparate aspects together in an entertaining tale that combines solid scholarship with an eye for the quirky, offbeat paths that tea has strayed upon during its long voyage. It celebrates the common heritage of a beverage we have all come to love, and plays a crucial part in the work of dismantling that obsolete dictum: East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.

The Hanyu Da Cidian (Unabridged Dictionary of Sinitic) (HDC) is the first large-scale comprehensive word dictionary in Chinese history to include both ancient and modern language. HDC is an excellent reference, but it is difficult to find items in it because they are arranged by radicals and residual strokes - hence the need for an alphabetical index of words. The present volume provides easy access to the more than 350,000 multisyllabic entries found in HDC. (An alphabetical index of monosyllabic entries is already available.) It uses Hanyu Pinyin to provide phonetic annotation for the character entries, which enables the user to locate them alphabetically.

An Alphabetical Index to the Hanyu Da Cidian

Jane Hickman

From the Bronze Age through the Middle Ages, a network of trade and migration routes brought people from across Eurasia into contact. Their commerce included political, social, and artistic ideas, as well as material goods such as metals and textiles. Reconfiguring the Silk Road offers new research on the earliest trade and cultural interactions along these routes, mapping the spread and influence of Silk Road economies and social structures over time. This volume features contributions by renowned scholars uncovering new discoveries related to populations that lived in the Tarim Basin, the advanced state of textile manufacturing in the region, and the diffusion of domesticated grains across Inner Asia. Other chapters include an analysis of the dispersal of languages across the Eurasian Steppe and a detailed examination of the domestication of the horse in the region. Contextualized with a foreword by Colin Renfrew and introduction by Victor Mair, Reconfiguring the Silk Road provides a new assessment of the intercultural evolution along the steppes and beyond. Contributors: David W. Anthony, Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Dorcas R. Brown, Peter Brown, Michael D. Frachetti, Jane Hickman, Philip L. Kohl, Victor H. Mair, J. P. Mallory, Joseph G. Manning, Colin Renfrew.

New Research on East-West Exchange in Antiquity

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

Experimental Essays on Zhuangzi is a classic in the field. Originally published in 1983, this edition makes it available again in an expanded version, with four additional contributions, and in an updated format, with pinyin transcription, Chinese characters embedded in the text, and reference style notes. The work is a well respected textbook and essential reader in Daoist thought. It continues to constitute an essential contribution to the study of Daoism and Chinese philosophy.

Experimental Essays on Zhuangzi

Professor Victor H Mair

Tun-huang Popular Narratives presents authoritative translations of four vernacular Chinese stories, taken from fragmentary texts usually referred to as pien-wen or 'transformation texts'. Dating from the late T'ang (618-907) and Five Dynasties (907-959) periods, the texts were discovered early last century in a cave at Tun-huang, in Chinese Central Asia. However, written down in an early colloquial language by semi-literate individuals and posing formidable philological problems, the texts have not been studied critically before. Nevertheless they represent the only surviving primary evidence of a widespread and flourishing world of popular entertainment during these centuries. The tales deal with both religious (mostly Buddhist) and secular themes, and make exciting and vivid reading.

Tun-huang Popular Narratives

With its fresh translations by newer voices in the field, its broad scope, and its flowing style, this anthology places the immense riches of Chinese literature within easy reach. Ranging from the beginnings to 1919, this abridged version of The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature retains all the characteristics of the original. In putting together these selections Victor H. Mair interprets "literature" very broadly to include not just literary fiction, poetry, and drama, but folk and popular literature, lyrics and arias, elegies and rhapsodies, biographies, autobiographies and memoirs, letters, criticism and theory, and travelogues and jokes.

The Shorter Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature

This is the most comprehensive study of pien-wen ("transformation texts" i.e., tales of metamorphosis) in any language since the manuscripts were discovered at the beginning of this century in a remote cave complex in northwest China. They are the earliest written vernacular narratives in China and are thus extremely important in the history of Chinese language and literature. Numerous scholarly controversies have surrounded the study of the texts in the last three quarters of a century; this volume seeks to resolve some of them--the extent, origins, and formal characteristics of the texts, the meaning of pien wen, the identity of the authors who composed these popular narratives and the scribes who copied them, the relationship of the texts to oral performance, and the reasons for the apparently sudden demise of the genre around the beginning of the Sung dynasty. This is a multi-disciplinary study that integrates findings from religious, literary, linguistic, sociological, and historical materials, carried out with intellectual rigor. It includes an extensive bibliography of relevant sources in many languages.

Tʼang Transformation Texts

The Columbia History of Chinese Literature is a comprehensive yet portable guide to China's vast literary traditions. Stretching from earliest times to the present, the text features original contributions by leading specialists working in all genres and periods. Chapters cover poetry, prose, fiction, and drama, and consider such contextual subjects as popular culture, the impact of religion, the role of women, and China's relationship with non-Sinitic languages and peoples. Opening with a major section on the linguistic and intellectual foundations of Chinese literature, the anthology traces the development of forms and movements over time, along with critical trends, and pays particular attention to the premodern canon.

Victor H. Mair

About

Books

Join the club