Sidelights on Chinese Life

Sidelights on Chinese Life
Author: J. Macgowan
Publisher: DigiCat
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2022-11-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

This examination of Chinese life and customs in the early twentieth century was written by the Reverend Macgowan who was a missionary. He covers several subjects including the Chinese people, Chinese Customs, Religious life, Schooling, and so on. The text is detailed and contains much information.

Peking

Peking
Author: Susan Naquin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 862
Release: 2001-01-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520923454

The central character in Susan Naquin's extraordinary new book is the city of Peking during the Ming and Qing periods. Using the city's temples as her point of entry, Naquin carefully excavates Peking's varied public arenas, the city's transformation over five centuries, its human engagements, and its rich cultural imprint. This study shows how modern Beijing's glittering image as China's great and ancient capital came into being and reveals the shifting identities of a much more complex past, one whose rich social and cultural history Naquin splendidly evokes. Temples, by providing a place where diverse groups could gather without the imprimatur of family or state, made possible a surprising assortment of community-building and identity-defining activities. By revealing how religious establishments of all kinds were used for fairs, markets, charity, tourism, politics, and leisured sociability, Naquin shows their decisive impact on Peking and, at the same time, illuminates their little-appreciated role in Chinese cities generally. Lacking most of the conventional sources for urban history, she has relied particularly on a trove of commemorative inscriptions that express ideas about the relationship between human beings and gods, about community service and public responsibility, about remembering and being remembered. The result is a book that will be essential reading in the field of Chinese studies for years to come.

Monograph Series

Monograph Series
Author: Statens etnografiska museum (Sweden)
Publisher:
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1981
Genre: Anthropology
ISBN:

Beijing

Beijing
Author: Lillian M. Li
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2008-04-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230605273

Chronicles the history of Beijing from its earliest days to the twenty-first century, discussing how economic growth as well as preparations for the 2008 Olympics have affected the city.

The Duchess Of Windsor

The Duchess Of Windsor
Author: Greg King
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corp.
Total Pages: 608
Release: 2011-05-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0806535210

“A sympathetic and believable portrait” of the American woman for whom King Edward VIII gave up the throne, with photos included (Christian Science Monitor). A woman's life can really be a succession of lives, each revolving around some emotionally compelling situation or challenge, and each marked off by some intense experience. It was the love story of the century—the king and the commoner. In December 1936, King Edward VIII abdicated the throne to marry “the woman I love,” Wallis Warfield Simpson, a twice-divorced American who quickly became one of the twentieth century's most famous personalities, a figure of intrigue and mystery, both admired and reviled. Wrongly blamed for the abdication crisis, Wallis suffered hostility from the Royal Family and much of the world. Yet interest in her story has remained constant, resulting in a small library of biographies that convey a thinly veiled animosity toward their subject. The truth, however, is infinitely more fascinating than the shallow, pathetic portrait that has often been painted. Using previously untapped sources, acclaimed biographer Greg King presents a complete and, for the first time, sympathetic portrait of the Duchess that sifts the decades of rumor and accusation to reveal the woman behind the legend. From her birth in Pennsylvania during the Gilded Age to her death in Paris in 1986, King takes the reader through a world of privilege, palaces, high society, and love with the accompaniment of hatreds, feuds, conspiracies, and lies. The cast of characters is vast: politicians and presidents, dictators and socialites. Twenty-four pages of photographs reveal the life of the Duchess in all its incomparable glamour and romance. “A wide, absurd cast of characters—led by the British royal family . . . Wallis’ lavish decorati

The Last Days of Old Beijing

The Last Days of Old Beijing
Author: Michael Meyer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2010-07-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0802779123

Journalist Michael Meyer has spent his adult life in China, first in a small village as a Peace Corps volunteer, the last decade in Beijing--where he has witnessed the extraordinary transformation the country has experienced in that time. For the past two years he has been completely immersed in the ancient city, living on one of its famed hutong in a century-old courtyard home he shares with several families, teaching English at a local elementary school--while all around him "progress" closes in as the neighborhood is methodically destroyed to make way for high-rise buildings, shopping malls, and other symbols of modern, urban life. The city, he shows, has been demolished many times before; however, he writes, "the epitaph for Beijing will read: born 1280, died 2008...what emperors, warlords, Japanese invaders, and Communist planners couldn't eradicate, the market economy can." The Last Days of Old Beijing tells the story of this historic city from the inside out-through the eyes of those whose lives are in the balance: the Widow who takes care of Meyer; his students and fellow teachers, the first-ever description of what goes on in a Chinese public school; the local historian who rallies against the government. The tension of preservation vs. modernization--the question of what, in an ancient civilization, counts as heritage, and what happens when a billion people want to live the way Americans do--suffuse Meyer's story.