‎Chine‎

‎Dong Stella‎

‎Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City‎

‎8vo, br. ed. Transformed from a swampland wilderness into a dazzling, modern-day Babylon, the Shanghai that predated Mao's cultural revolution was a city like no other: redolent with opium and underworld crime, booming with foreign trade, blessed with untold wealth and marred by abject squalor. Journalist Stella Dong captures all the exoticism, extremes, and excitement of this legendary city as if it were a larger-than-life character in a fantastic novel. Review: For a good, spicy read about colonial Asia's most decadent city, this is the book. Stella Dong, a second-generation Chinese-American living in New York, tells the story of Old Shanghai in racy style: readers expecting tales of drugs, prostitution, and gang warfare will not be disappointed. Her scholarship is sound, however, and at the end of each chapter she provides bibliographies of drier, more academic studies for those wishing to delve deeper. The Treaty of Nanking that ended the First Opium War between Britain and China in 1842 granted trading concessions in Shanghai to the European powers. The international currents shaping the city over the next hundred years were complex: British merchants, Chinese warlords, Russian emigrés, Sephardic Jews, and German spies exploited its extraterritorial status to make Shanghai a hotbed of greed, vice, and intrigue. Opium was crucial to the city's extraordinary wealth and lawlessness, though Dong also relates the rise of its criminal gangs to the development of coastal steamships and consequent loss of inland-transportation jobs. Foreign participation in the opium trade was not confined to the British: the role of the French Concession in Shanghai is described in well-researched detail. The flamboyant personalities that prospered in the city's unfettered environment come alive, characters like Pockmarked Huang, who combined the post of police chief in the French Concession with leadership of the Green Gang. Dong explores Shanghai's political significance both as the source of Chiang Kai-shek's fortunes and as a center of Communist revolutionary activity. As the city again becomes the leading commercial metropolis of a dynamic national economy, Shanghai 1842-1949 successfully documents its unique role in the development of modern China. --John Stevenson‎

‎Vincent Durand-Dastès‎

‎Récits de rêve en Asie Orientale‎

‎8vo, br. ed. 192pp. Métaphore de l'existence, indice de l'avenir, les rêves furent aussi lus comme des symptômes par les traités de médecine chinoise. Les maîtres de rituels exorcistes surent y relever la trace des démons à la poursuite desquels ils s'étaient lancés. Mais ce ne sont pas de ces " rêves savants " dont nous parle Extrême-Orient Extrême-Occident. La perspective est ici avant tout littéraire. Quels sont les traits rhétoriques du récit de rêve en Asie orientale ? Quel rôle joue l'image onirique, le récit de rêve, au sein d'un poème, d'une anecdote ou d'un conte classique, d'une pièce de théâtre ou d'un roman long aux maints rebondissements ? Quelle langue, autrement dit, parle les rêves ? En Asie orientale, les rêves font beaucoup de choses à l'écriture.‎

‎Gelber Harry Gregory‎

‎Dragon and the Foreign Devils: China and the World, 1100 Bc to the Present‎

‎8vo, hardcover in dj. pp.512. China is the most exciting rising power in the world today. The explosive growth of its economy and the possibility that it might soon become the next superpower, dominant in East Asia and influential in every part of the world, has attracted universal interest, admiration and envy. Most histories of China approach that huge and populous country through the story of its dynasties, its struggle to defend its borders and its internal politics. Harry Gelber's "The Dragon and the Foreign Devils" is the first history for the general reader to tell the story of China from the outside as well as from the inside. It explores the relationships involved, from the incursions into China of steppe horsemen around 200 BC to the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century AD, from the first arrival of European travellers to China's decline, after 1911, into an object of the policies of the major powers, and on to the Revolution on 1949 and the Tienanmen Square protest in 1989. It explains what moved these minor and major foreign societies and how concerns with China fitted into their own major interests and views of the world. And, it outlines the recurring cycles of Chinese history, from turmoil and disorder to strong central government and back to turmoil. Informative text boxes elaborate on particular people, topics or key moments to complement the main narrative. These mini-essays deal with a wide range of topics from 'Confucius' and 'Concubines' to 'Tea' and 'Silk', and from the debilitating influence of the last nineteenth-century empress, 'Cixi', to the decisive influence on the 1941-45 Pacific War of the US Navy's ability to read 'Japanese naval codes'; and from 'Madame Chiang's' glamour to 'Mao's Sexual Habits'.‎

‎Denis, Antoine‎

‎the perfect union the chinese Methods‎

‎4to, hardcover in dj. The ancient secrets of Chinese love-making, illustrated in color.‎

‎Benton Gregor and Lin Chun‎

‎Was Mao Really a Monster?: The Academic Response to Chang and Halliday's "Mao: The Unknown Story"‎

‎8vo, br. ed. 208. Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday was published in 2005 to a great fanfare. The book portrays Mao as a monster – equal to or worse than Hitler and Stalin – and a fool who won power by native cunning and ruled by terror. It received a rapturous welcome from reviewers in the popular press and rocketed to the top of the worldwide bestseller list. Few works on China by writers in the West have achieved its impact. Reviews by serious China scholars, however, tended to take a different view. Most were sharply critical, questioning its authority and the authors’ methods , arguing that Chang and Halliday’s book is not a work of balanced scholarship, as it purports to be, but a highly selective and even polemical study that sets out to demonise Mao. This book brings together sixteen reviews of Mao: The Unknown Story – all by internationally well-regarded specialists in modern Chinese history, and published in relatively specialised scholarly journals. Taken together they demonstrate that Chang and Halliday’s portrayal of Mao is in many places woefully inaccurate. While agreeing that Mao had many faults and was responsible for some disastrous policies, they conclude that a more balanced picture is needed.‎

‎Preston Diana‎

‎The Boxer Rebellion: The Dramatic Story of China's War on Foreigners That Shook the World in the Summer of 1900‎

‎8vo, br. ed. 436pp. Portrays the dramatic human experience of the Boxer Rebellion from both a Western and Chinese perspective, drawing on diaries, memoirs, and letters of those that lived through this pivotal time in the history of China. Reprint.‎

‎Luo Guanzhong‎

‎Quelling the Demons' Revolt: A Novel of Ming China‎

‎8vo, br. ed. 213pp. In this Ming-era novel, historical narrative, raucous humor, and the supernatural are interwoven to tell the tale of an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Song dynasty. A poor young girl meets an old woman who gives her a magic book that allows her to create rice and money. Her father, terrified that his daughter's demonic nature might be discovered, marries her off. Forced to flee, she and others with supernatural abilities find themselves in the midst of a grotesque version of a historical uprising, in which facts are intermingled with slapstick humor and wild fictions. Attributed to the writer Luo Guanzhong, Quelling the Demons' Revolt is centered on the events of the rebellion led by Wang Ze in 1047?48. But it is a distorted, humorous version, in which Wang Ze's lieutenants show up as a comical peddler and a mysterious Daoist priest and a celebrated warrior appears despite having died many years earlier. Rather than fantastic adventures and supernatural marvels, the author points to human vanities and fixations as well as social injustice, warning of the vulnerability of any pursuit of order in a world plagued by demonic forces as well as mundane corruption. Although the story takes place long before the era in which it was written, ultimately Quelling the Demons' Revolt is the story of the Ming dynasty in Song masquerade, presciently warning of the dynasty's downfall. The novel is divided into chapters, but in many ways it is an arrangement of self-contained stories that draw on vernacular storytelling. This translation offers English-speaking readers a spirited example of social critique combined with caustic humor from the era of Luo Guanzhong.‎

‎Goebel Rolf J.‎

‎Constructing China. Kafka's Orientalist Discourse‎

‎8vo, original cloth (no dj issued).137pp. Constructing China: Kafka's Orientalist Discourse (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) (ISBN:1571131442) Goebel studies four representative works by Kafka that explore the problems of the Western representation of the Orient: his 'Description of a Struggle'; several letters to Felice Bauer, offering an interpretation of Chinese poetry in connection with the conflict between writing and Kafka's love for Felice; the canonical story 'The Great Wall of China', parodically appropriating sterotypes of China's stagnant history and authoritarian emperors for a refutation of colonialist ideas of progress; and the sequel 'An Old Manuscript', dramatising China's invasion by foreign powers and the breakdown of crosscultural communication. Elucidating these themes from a broadly comparative perspective, Goebel shows Kafka to be one of German modernism's most intriguing and self-reflective writers on the Orient.ROLF J. GOEBEL is Professor of German at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.‎

‎STOECKLIN Daniel, Pref. Jean-Luc Domenach‎

‎Enfants des rues en Chine‎

‎8vo, br. ed. en français. pp.367. pref. Jean-Luc Domenach‎

‎Petrucci Raphael‎

‎Chinese Painters a Critical Study‎

‎Very Good.in good jacket. Well-illustrated work on Chinese painters, with sections on technique and evolution of style, illustrated with 25 duotone plates. Describes the painter's equipment, representation of forms, division of subjects and inspiration, as well as analyzing the art chronologically, from its origins through the intervention of Buddhism on through the T'ang, Sung, Yuan, Ming and Chi'ing Periods. Yellowish tan cloth, 155 pages. First Edition.. 8vol‎

‎Norman Smith (Editor) James Flath (Editor)‎

‎Beyond Suffering: Recounting War in Modern China (Contemporary Chinese Studies)‎

‎8vo, br. ed. 306pp. China was afflicted by a brutal succession of conflicts through much of the 19th and 20th centuries. In this examination of how wartime suffering defined the nation and shaped its people, a distinguished group of historians of modern China look beyond the geopolitical aspects of war to explore its social, institutional, and cultural dimensions, from child rearing and education to massacres and warlord mutinies. Though accounts of war-inflicted suffering are often fragmented or politically motivated, the authors show that they are crucial to understanding the multiple fronts on which wars are fought, experienced, and remembered.‎

‎Scherzer F.‎

‎La Puissance Paternelle En Chine. Etude De Droit Chinois ( Bibliothequw Orientale Elzévirienne)‎

‎16mo, pp.79, paper wrap (would need rebinding), ow. very good, uncut, scarce. trés rare, necessite reliure, autrement Trés Bon Etat. copertine conservate. avrebbe bisogno di rilegatura, altrimenti ottimo, pagine intonse. patriarcato in cina. Cet ouvrage est le volume XXIII de la fameuse bibliothèque Elzévirienne.‎

‎Terzani Tiziano‎

‎La Fine è Il Mio Inizio‎

‎8vo, rileg. edit. pp.446. qualche orecchietta e sottolineatura a matita, altrimenti ottimo. Tiziano Terzani, sapendo di essere arrivato alla fine del suo percorso, parla al figlio Folco di cos'è stata la sua vita e di cos'è la vita: "Se hai capito qualcosa la vuoi lasciare lì in un pacchetto", dice. Così racconta di tutta una vita trascorsa a viaggiare per il mondo alla ricerca della verità. E cercando il senso delle tante cose che ha fatto e delle tante persone che è stato, delinea un affresco delle grandi passioni del proprio tempo. "Se mi chiedi alla fine cosa lascio, lascio un libro che forse potrà aiutare qualcuno a vedere il mondo in modo migliore, a godere di più della propria vita, a vederla in un contesto più grande, come quello che io sento così forte."‎

‎by Franck Billé (Editor, Contributor), Sören Urbansky (Editor, Contributor), Christos Lynteris , David Walker , Kevin Carrico, Magnus Fiskesjö , Romain Dittgen , Ross Anthony, ,Xiaojian Zhao , Yu Qiu‎

‎Yellow Perils: China Narratives in the Contemporary World‎

‎8vo, br. ed. pp.284. China’s meteoric rise and ever expanding economic and cultural footprint have been accompanied by widespread global disquiet. Whether admiring or alarmist, media discourse and representations of China often tap into the myths and prejudices that emerged through specific historical encounters. These deeply embedded anxieties have shown great resilience, as in recent media treatments of SARS and the H5N1 virus, which echoed past beliefs connecting China and disease. Popular perceptions of Asia, too, continue to be framed by entrenched racial stereotypes: its people are unfathomable, exploitative, cunning, or excessively hardworking. This interdisciplinary collection of original essays offers a broad view of the mechanics that underlie Yellow Peril discourse by looking at its cultural deployment and repercussions worldwide. Building on the richly detailed historical studies already published in the context of the United States and Europe, contributors to Yellow Perils confront the phenomenon in Italy, Australia, South Africa, Nigeria, Mongolia, Hong Kong, and China itself. With chapters based on archival material and interviews, the collection supplements and often challenges superficial journalistic accounts and top-down studies by economists and political scientists. Yellow Peril narratives, contributors find, constitute cultural vectors of multiple kinds of anxieties, spanning the cultural, racial, political, and economic. Indeed, the emergence of the term “Yellow Peril” in such disparate contexts cannot be assumed to be singular, to refer to the same fears, or to revolve around the same stereotypes. The discourse, even when used in reference to a single country like China, is therefore inherently fractured and multiple. The term “Yellow Peril” may feel unpalatable and dated today, but the ethnographic, geographic, and historical breadth of this collection?experiences of Chinese migration and diaspora, historical reflections on the discourse of the Yellow Peril in China, and contemporary analyses of the global reverberations of China’s economic rise?offers a unique overview of the ways in which anti-Chinese narratives continue to play out in today’s world. This timely and provocative book will appeal to Chinese and Asian Studies scholars, but will also be highly relevant to historians and anthropologists working on diasporic communities and on ethnic formations both within and beyond Asia. Contributors: Christos Lynteris David Walker Kevin Carrico Magnus Fiskesjö Romain Dittgen Ross Anthony Xiaojian Zhao Yu Qiu‎

‎Rossi Vittorio G.‎

‎La Terra è Un'arancia Dolce‎

‎Klausner Carla L.‎

‎The Seljuk Vezirate:a Study of Civil Administration, 1055-1194: A Study of Civil Administration, 1055-1194‎

‎8vo, br. ed. Pp. viii, 143 Original stiff wrappers. In a very good condition, crisp interior. ~ First edition. Harvard Middle Eastern Monograph Series, XXII‎

‎Platt Stephen R.‎

‎Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War‎

‎8vo, br. ed. xix-470pp. A gripping account of China’s nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion, one of the largest civil wars in history. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom brims with unforgettable characters and vivid re-creations of massive and often gruesome battles—a sweeping yet intimate portrait of the conflict that shaped the fate of modern China. The story begins in the early 1850s, the waning years of the Qing dynasty, when word spread of a major revolution brewing in the provinces, led by a failed civil servant who claimed to be the son of God and brother of Jesus. The Taiping rebels drew their power from the poor and the disenfranchised, unleashing the ethnic rage of millions of Chinese against their Manchu rulers. This homegrown movement seemed all but unstoppable until Britain and the United States stepped in and threw their support behind the Manchus: after years of massive carnage, all opposition to Qing rule was effectively snuffed out for generations. Stephen R. Platt recounts these events in spellbinding detail, building his story on two fascinating characters with opposing visions for China’s future: the conservative Confucian scholar Zeng Guofan, an accidental general who emerged as the most influential military strategist in China’s modern history; and Hong Rengan, a brilliant Taiping leader whose grand vision of building a modern, industrial, and pro-Western Chinese state ended in tragic failure. This is an essential and enthralling history of the rise and fall of the movement that, a century and a half ago, might have launched China on an entirely different path into the modern world. Hong Kong in 1852 was a diseased and watery place, a rocky island off the southern shore of the Qing Empire where the inhabitants lived in dread of what one described as "the miasma set free from the ground which was everywhere being turned up." A small British settlement sat between the mountains and the bay, but the emerald and sapphire glory of the scene belied the darkness below the surface. Leaving the concentration of godowns, military barracks, and trading firms along the colony's nostalgically named central streets (The Queen's Road, Wellington Street, Holly-wood Road), one could find the grandest vistas in the gravel paths that led up the coast into the hills, but the European settlement soon gave way to scattered Chinese houses among fields growing rice and sweet potatoes unchanged in the decade since the British took the island as their prize in the Opium War. Some of the wealthier merchants had built opulent mansions in those hills, with terraced gardens commanding a view of the harbor and town. But as though their builders had strayed too far from the protection of the settlement, the inhabitants of those houses sickened and died. Marked as "homes of fever or death," the ghostly manors sat silent and abandoned, their empty gaze passing judgment on the settlers below. One of those settlers was Theodore Hamberg, a young Swedish missionary with a thin chinstrap beard that set off his delicate, nearly effeminate features. He was blessed with a lovely voice, and in his youth in Stockholm he had sung together with Jenny Lind, the "Swedish Nightingale." But while Lind went on to conquer the opera halls of Europe and America, bringing suitors such as Frédéric Chopin and Hans Christian Andersen to their knees along the way, Hamberg's life took an entirely different path. His strong tenor found its destined outlet in preaching, and in 1847 he left his native Sweden to sail to the opposite end of the world, to this malarial colony of Hong Kong, with the sole purpose of bringing the Chinese to their knees after a different fashion. Theodore Hamberg might well have lived his life in obscurity, for his proudest accomplishments meant little to anyone beyond a small circle of Protestant missionaries. He was one of the first Europeans in his generation to brave the Chinese countryside, leaving the relative safety of Hong Kong to preach in a village outside the Chinese trading port of Canton a hundred miles up the Pearl River (though for health reasons he finally returned to the colony). He was also the first to learn to speak the dialect of the Hakka, or "guest people"-a gypsy minority thickly populous in south China. All of that might have meant little to anyone in the world outside except that one day in the late spring of 1852, one of his converts from the countryside brought a guest to meet him, a short, round-faced Hakka named Hong Rengan who had a remarkable story to tell. The strangest thing about this Hakka, Hamberg recalled from their first meeting, was how much he already seemed to know about God and Jesus despite the fact that he hailed from well beyond the narrow reach of the Hong Kong missionaries. Hamberg listened with curiosity as Hong Rengan gave a baffling account of the events leading to his arrival in Hong Kong. He spoke of visions and battles, armies and congregations of believers, a heavenly prophet from among the Hakkas. He had, or at least so he claimed, been hunted by the agents of the Qing dynasty and had lived in disguise under an assumed name. He had been kidnapped, had escaped, and had lived for four days in the forest, six days in a cave. None of it made much sense, though, and Hamberg confessed, "I could form no clear conception of the whole matter." Not knowing what to make of the story, he asked Hong Rengan to write it down, which he did, and then-though Hamberg had expected him to stay for baptism-he left without explanation. Hamberg put the sheets of paper with Hong Rengan's story into his desk and turned his mind to other matters. He would think little of them again for nearly a year, until the spring of 1853 when the news came that Nanjing had fallen in a torrent of blood, and Hamberg realized that the strange events sketched out in Hong Rengan's tale meant more than he had ever imagined. News of the mounting upheaval in China reached Hamberg and the other settlers in Hong Kong and up the coast in Shanghai only in scattered and vague accounts. From Chinese government reports there seemed no pattern to the rising disorder of the early 1850s, no principle or cohesion. Local uprisings and small-scale banditry in China's countryside were a perennial thorn in the side of the imperial authorities, hardly anything new or noteworthy, though they certainly did seem to have increased in the years following the Opium War. Chinese travelers and clandestine Catholic missionaries deep in the interior forwarded rumors of some larger movement led by a man known as "Tian De," or "Heavenly Virtue," but just as many accounts reported that the man was dead, killed by imperial forces, or that he had never existed in the first place. In the absence of any clear news, the foreigners in their coastal ports paid little attention, concerned only that bandits might disrupt the production of tea and silk. But the fall of the southern capital of Nanjing in 1853 brought a massive civil war right to the doorstep of the foreign settlement in Shanghai, which was just two hundred miles downriver at the mouth of the sea. Half a million rebels calling themselves the Taiping Tianguo ("Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace") flooded down the Yangtze from central China on a grand flotilla of commandeered ships to Nanjing, leaving a swath of emptied cities and shattered imperial defenses behind them, and the debate was settled; this was no mere bandit uprising. Fear gripped the city of Shanghai. There was no direct communication with Nanjing, no concrete information (the American steamer Susquehanna tried to sail upriver to Nanjing to investigate but ran aground). Rumors spread that the insurgents would next march on Shanghai to attack the foreigners, and the city's Chinese population boarded up their houses, packed up their furniture, and took to riverboats or fled into the countryside for safety. The foreign settlers called up their unready defenses, rallying a haphazard volunteer defense corps to man the city walls and bringing up the few ships in ready reach-two British steamers and a brig-of- war, and one steamer each for the French and Americans. But there it ended, at least for the time being. The Taiping did not march on Shanghai, and the city's vigilance eased off. Instead, the rebels set their targets northward toward Beijing, the capital of the Manchu rulers, and dug in for a long and bloody campaign with Nanjing as their base of operations. Their "Heavenly Capital," as Nanjing was now renamed, lay tantalizingly just out of reach of Shanghai. One British ship did manage to visit in late April 1853 but brought back conflicting impressions of what was happening there, the clearest opinion being that of the British plenipotentiary, who declared the Taiping to have an ideology of "superstition and nonsense." The visitors learned nothing about the rebels' origins. Despite the scarcity of clear information, raw accounts of the civil war in China radiated outward from Shanghai and Hong Kong to capture the imagination of the Western world. Europe had been through its own convulsions just five years earlier with the revolutions of 1848, and the events in China seemed a remarkable parallel: the downtrodden people of China, oppressed by their Manchu overlords, had, it seemed, risen up to demand satisfaction. The Economist called it "a social change or convulsion such as have of late afflicted Europe" and mused that "it is singular to find similar commotions at the same time in Asia and Europe." Here was evidence that the empire at the other end of the world was now connected to the economic and political systems of the West. Karl Marx, in 1853 a London correspondent for the New-York Daily Tribune struggling to give shape to his ideas on capitalism, likewise considered the rebellion in China to be a sign of China's integration into the global economy, describing it as the end result of Britain's forcing China open to foreign trade in the recent Opium War. In Marx's terminology, what was happening in China was not merely a rebellion or a hodgepodge of uprisings but "one formidable revolution," one that demonstrated the interconnectedness of the industrial world. Indeed, it was in China, he argued, that one could see the future of the West: "the next uprising of the people of Europe, and their next movement for republican freedom and economy of Government," he wrote, "may depend more probably on what is now passing in the Celestial Empire- the very opposite of Europe-than on any other political cause that now exists." As he explained it, the disorder in China had its roots in the opium trade; a decade earlier, Britain had cracked China's markets open with its warships, and in doing so it had undermined the "superstitious faith" of the Chinese in their ruling dynasty. Exposure to the world meant the destruction of the old order, he believed, for "dissolution must follow as surely as that of any mummy carefully preserved in a hermetically sealed coffin, whenever it is brought into contact with the open air." But the effects of the Qing dynasty's dissolution would not be limited to China itself. The whole of the Taiping Revolution was, in his mind, Britain's fault, and now the effects of her actions overseas were going to be felt back home: "the question," he wrote, "is how that revolution will in time react on England, and through England on Europe." Marx predicted that the loss of China's markets to the Taiping Revolution would undermine British exports of cotton and wool. Merchants in a chaotic China would accept only bullion in exchange for their goods, sapping Britain's stores of precious metals. Worse, the revolution would cut off England's source of tea imports, and the price of tea (to which most of the British were addicted) would spike in England at the same time that a poor harvest in Western Europe looked likely to send food prices through the roof, reducing still further the demand for manufactured goods and undermining the whole manufacturing industry on which Britain's economy depended. "It may be safely augured," Marx concluded, "that the Chinese revolution will throw the spark into the overloaded mine of the present industrial system and cause the explosion of the long-prepared general crisis, which, spreading abroad, will be closely followed by political revolutions on the Continent." If Marx was keen to convince the readers of the New-York Daily Tribune that the Chinese civil war was one of class struggle and economic revolution analogous to the movements in Europe, the editors of the Daily Picayune in the southern slave port of New Orleans saw it in rather different terms, after their own particular vision of the world. It was, as they saw it, a racial war, and China was a slave state in upheaval. The Taiping had emerged, the editors explained, from the southern provinces of Guangxi and Guangdong, whose inhabitants were "principally of the primitive Chinese race." The northern Manchus, in contrast, were "the ruling race in China" who had taken the throne two hundred years earlier, since which time "China has been accordingly ruled as a conquered country by its masters." The two races never mixed, they explained, and in accordance with their southern vision of a harmonious slave-based society, the Picayune offered that in China "The quiet, patient, laboring millions have submitted to their masters mostly with exemplary gentleness." The sole threat to the stability of this Manchu-Chinese country of peacefully coexisting masters and slaves was these "primitive" people of south China who refused to submit to the yoke. The Taiping Rebellion, then, was a dark analogy to an uprising of African slaves in the United States. The London Times, for its part, was the most prescient of observers, honing in immediately on the question of whether Britain should send its navy into the Chinese conflict and, if so, on which side. In an editorial on May 17, 1853, just after the news of Nanjing's fall reached London, an editorial in The Times noted that the Taiping seemed unstoppable and that "according to all computable chances, they will succeed thus far in subverting the Government of China." The Times had also run a report from a Shanghai paper asking whether "a change of masters" was something desired by the Chinese nation at large, offering that the Taiping-though hardly beloved in northern China-represented a force of change that was indeed welcome to the Chinese, and "throughout the country the feeling seems to be growing deeper that the exactions and oppressions of the mandarins are no longer to be borne." By the end of the summer, The Times declared flatly that the rebellion in China was "in all respects the greatest revolution the world has yet seen." But the rebels themselves were a cipher. The reader of The Times would easily conclude that the Taiping enjoyed the support, grudging at least, of the Chinese people and were poised to overthrow the Manchus and usher in a new era of government. But the editors also sounded a note of caution about Britain's ignorance. "We are without any substantial information as to the origin or objects of the rebellion," they wrote. "We know that the existing Government of China is likely to be subverted in a civil war, but nothing more." Britain, they worried, simply didn't know enough about the nature or ideology of the rebels to decide whether it should support or encourage them: "We cannot tell in the case before us on which side our interest or our duties may lie-whether the insurrection is justifiable or unjustifiable, promising or unpromising; whether the feelings of the people are involved in it or not, or whether its success would bring a change for the better or worse, or any change at all, in our own relations with the Chinese." As it turned out, however, answers to the most pressing of these questions-of the origins of the rebellion, of who the Taiping really were and what they believed in-were to be found in Hong Kong, scribbled on a few stray sheets of paper stuffed into a drawer in Theodore Hamberg's desk.‎

‎Bova Ben and eric Choi‎

‎Carbide Tipped Pens: Seventeen Tales of Hard Science Fiction‎

‎8vo, br. ed. minor shelfwear, ow good.‎

‎Echenberg, Myron‎

‎Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894-1901‎

‎8vo, br. ed. , xvi, 349pp, Illustrated. Tells the story of ten cities on five continents that were ravaged by the third bubonic plague.‎

‎Hackforth-Jones Gilbert‎

‎Yellow Peril‎

‎16mo, br. ed. This book is fitted with a removable, clearcover, dustwrapper film.There is some minor creasing, edge rubbing and general wear to the spine and outer card covers.Page outer edges are lightly tanned with age.Back cover reads, Noel Coward's lines-(with acknowledgements)- It's such a surprise when the British own the earth.They give rise to such hilarity and mirth - are the inspiration behind Gilbert Hackforth-Jones's nostalgic picture of naval life in North China in the latter part of the 1920s. 4 1/4 Inches Inches Wide By 7 Inches Long‎

‎Chan Koonchung‎

‎Il Demone Della prosperità‎

‎8vo, ril. edit. sovracoperta, 292pp. Pechino, anno 2013. L'enigma al quale si trova di fronte il giornalista e scrittore Vecchio Chen è quantomeno insolito. Un mese intero della recente storia cinese sembra misteriosamente «scomparso», non soltanto dai resoconti ufficiali e dagli archivi dei media nazionali, ma anche dalla memoria della gente. Un mese fantasma di cui, per qualche strano motivo, solo due persone molto vicine al protagonista sembrano avere un ricordo vivido e doloroso: l'annuncio di una disastrosa crisi economica planetaria e le sue conseguenze: repressione, razionamenti di cibo e leggi marziali. Che cosa è successo di così terribile da non poter essere ricordato? Come si spiega questa amnesia collettiva in una Cina dalle atmosfere rarefatte, un paradiso dove regnano ricchezza e stabilità e tutti sono felici? I conti non tornano a Vecchio Chen e ai quattro amici che si uniscono alla sua ricerca; un'indagine azzardata in cui metteranno a rischio ogni cosa, spingendosi a compiere la più avventata delle mosse possibili: il rapimento di un membro del Politburo del Partito? Pubblicato a Hong Kong e proibito in Cina, dove è circolato sottobanco tra gli intellettuali e i blogger ed è entrato nella top ten dei best seller venduti al mercato nero, accolto all'estero come un caso letterario, Il demone della prosperità ha scosso pubblico e critica per il suo impietoso attacco al regime della Repubblica Popolare Cinese. Un feroce romanzo fantapolitico dai tratti inequivocabilmente orwelliani, che descrive magistralmente le nostre paure più nascoste.‎

‎Orlandi Fernando, Intr. Michael M. Hunt‎

‎New Sources and Opportunities for Research Into the History of Contemporary China, the International Communist Movement and the Cold War‎

‎8vo, br, ed. pp.144.‎

‎Yu Hua‎

‎Il Settimo Giorno‎

‎8vo, br. ed. pp.188. Un'ironica meditazione sul destino e sul senso della fine, una critica feroce della Cina contemporanea, fra comunismo e ipercapitalismo. Yang Fei esce di casa una mattina e trova una nebbia fitta mista a una strana neve luminosa: è in ritardo per la sua cremazione. Inizia così il viaggio nell'Aldilà di un uomo vissuto, troppo brevemente, nella Cina del capitalismo socialista e delle sue aberranti contraddizioni. In un'avventura di sette giorni, il protagonista incontrerà persone care smarrite da tempo, imparando nuove cose di loro e di se stesso. Conoscenti e sconosciuti gli racconteranno, poi, la propria storia nell'inferno vero, l'Aldiquà: demolizioni forzate, corruzione, tangenti, feti buttati nel fiume come rifiuti, miriadi di poveracci che pullulano in bunker sotterranei come formiche, traffico di organi, consumismo sfrenato... La morte livella finalmente le diseguaglianze, svelando l'essenziale, e i cittadini di questa necropoli soave uscita dalla penna di Yu Hua ci insegnano tutta la semplicità dell'amore.‎

‎Jullien François‎

‎L'apparizione dell'altro. Lo scarto e L'incontro‎

‎8vo, br. ed. 176pp. Se c'è qualcosa che accomuna tutti i giorni di una vita è la ricerca di qualcosa che manca. C'è un desiderio, un impulso che spinge a riempire una mancanza strutturale, che fa parte di noi. Quello che, per così dire, la nostra natura ci invita a cercare imbattendoci nell'insoddisfazione e nell'inquietudine di mille vicoli ciechi è l'altro. Non dobbiamo però aspettarci di trovarlo laggiù da qualche parte, come se fosse un fantasma lontano, perché in questo modo il pensiero si attorciglia su se stesso e non trova nulla. François Jullien ci svela che l'altro si trova vicino a noi, a portata di mano, in ciò che pigramente consideriamo già nostro. L'inaudito, il diverso, non cade magicamente dal cielo, ma si trascina in modo spensierato nei momenti più banali. L'altro non è ciò che è opposto e contrario. Ciò che è contrario è posto di fronte, è inerte e ordinato, e non ha bisogno di affrontare l'ignoto. Cercare l'altro è possibile soltanto aprendo un varco in ciò che consideriamo simile e familiare, vicino, apparentemente già noto. L'incontro con ciò che ci manca è possibile se mettiamo in discussione quello che crediamo di possedere. Così scopriremo che la nostra ricerca quotidiana ci spinge incessantemente a smascherare l'ignoto in ciò che già ci appartiene. Pensare all'altro: non è questo che può far rivivere la filosofia e, soprattutto, darci l'accesso all'esistenza?‎

‎Delmas-marty Mireille, Pierre-Etienne Will‎

‎La Chine et la Démocratie‎

‎8vo, br. ed. pp.893. Cet ouvrage se situe dans une perspective dynamique : partant des ressources politiques inhérentes à la société chinoise, il s'interroge sur la capacité de celle-ci à évoluer vers une démocratie dans le contexte économique et juridique nouveau qui résulte de la mondialisation. Enraciné dans l'histoire de l'Empire et du premier XXe siècle, appuyé sur des recherches pour la plupart inédites, l'inventaire porte sur les institutions publiques et " civiles ", les mentalités et les pratiques, les débats d'idées et les expériences. Il montre que la vision des réformateurs de la Chine républicaine, bien qu'influencée par l'Occident, était nourrie d'une tradition juridique chinoise forte, et même " moderne " à certains égards. Mais le retour actuel au droit, tel que l'analysent les dernières parties, ne suffit pas à garantir l'ouverture politique. Faut-il y voir une sorte de compensation illusoire ou bien le détour par lequel pourrait émerger une nouvelle forme de citoyenneté ? L'ambition des auteurs n'est ni de poser un diagnostic ni de faire des prévisions, mais d'éclairer un processus dont les racines remontent très loin et qui est encore inachevé.‎