Urban Life and Intellectual Crisis in Middle-Period China, 800-1100
Title
Urban Life and Intellectual Crisis in Middle-Period China, 800-1100
ISBN
9789048554331
Format
eBook PDF
Number of pages
290
Language
English
Publication date
Dimensions
15.6 x 23.4 cm
Also available as
Hardback - € 136,00
Table of Contents
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Preface
Introduction. The Emergence of the City into Writing
Chapter 1. The City at the Center of the World: Chang’an as Center and as Ruin in the Ninth Century
Chapter 2. Finding Oneself in the City: Crowds, Commodities, and Subjectivity in the Eleventh Century
Chapter 3. Losing the Way in the City: Infrastructure, Money, and Intellectual Crisis in the Eleventh Century
Conclusion. The City Remergent
Bibliography
Primary sources
Secondary sources

Reviews and Features

Honourable Mention for the Joseph Levenson Prize (China, pre-1900) at the AAS 2024 Book Awards

"This is a challenging and significant book that should have a lasting impact on middle period scholarship."
- Hugh Clark, Journal of Chinese History, Cambridge University Press (2023)

Christian de Pee

Urban Life and Intellectual Crisis in Middle-Period China, 800-1100

In the eleventh century, the cities of the Song Empire (960-1279) emerged into writing. Literati in prior centuries had looked away from crowded streets, but literati in the eleventh century found beauty in towering buildings and busy harbors. Their purpose in writing the city was ideological. On the written page, they tried to establish a distinction that eluded them in the avenues and to discern an immanent pattern in the movement of people, goods, and money. By the end of the eleventh century, however, they recognized that they had failed in their efforts. They had lost the Way in the city. Urban Life and Intellectual Crisis in Middle-Period China, 800-1100 reveals the central place of urban life in the history of the eleventh century. Important developments in literary innovation and monetary policy, in canonical exegesis and civil engineering, in financial reform and public health, converge in this book as they converged in the city.
Author

Christian de Pee

Christian de Pee in Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Writing of Weddings in Middle-Period China: Text and Ritual Practice in the Eighth through Fourteenth Centuries and a co-editor of Senses of the City: Perceptions of Hangzhou and the Southern Song (1127-1179).