Book ID: CBB001214471

Mapping China and Managing the World: Culture, Cartography and Cosmology in Late Imperial Times (2013)

unapi

Smith, Richard J. (Author)


Routledge


Publication Date: 2013
Physical Details: xvi + 270 pp.; ill.; maps
Language: English

From the founding of the Qin dynasty in 221 BCE to the present, the Chinese have been preoccupied with the concept of order (zhi). This cultural preoccupation has found expression not only in China's highly refined bureaucratic institutions and methods of social and economic organization but also in Chinese philosophy, religious and secular ritual, and a number of comprehensive systems for classifying every form of human achievement, as well as all natural and supernatural phenomena. Richard J. Smith's Mapping China and Managing the World focuses on several crucial devices employed by the Chinese for understanding and ordering their vast and variegated world, which they saw as encompassing "all under Heaven." The book begins with discussions of how the ancient work known as the Yijing (Classic of Changes) and maps of "the world" became two prominent means by which the Chinese in imperial times (221 BCE to 1912) managed space and time. Smith goes on to show how ritual (li) served as a powerful tool for overcoming disorder, structuring Chinese society, and maintaining dynastic legitimacy. He then develops the idea that just as the Chinese classics and histories ordered the past, and ritual ordered the present, so divination ordered the future. The book concludes by emphasizing the enduring relevance of the Yijing in Chinese intellectual and cultural life as well as its place in the history of Sino-foreign interactions. This selection of essays by one of the foremost scholars of Chinese intellectual and cultural history will be welcomed by Chinese and East Asian historians, as well as those interested more broadly in the cultures of, and interactions between, China and East Asia.

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Reviewed By

Review Henderson, John B. (2014) Review of "Mapping China and Managing the World: Culture, Cartography and Cosmology in Late Imperial Times". Imago Mundi: A Review of Early Cartography (pp. 248-249). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001214471/

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Authors & Contributors
Nawrocki, François
Jaynes, Jeffrey
Nanda, Vivek
Storm, Reinder
Argounes, Fabrice
Yongtao Du
Concepts
Cartography
Maps; atlases
Science, general histories
East Asia, civilization and culture
Science and culture
Cross-cultural interaction; cultural influence
Time Periods
Early modern
Modern
Qing dynasty (China, 1644-1912)
Medieval
18th century
17th century
Places
China
Europe
India
Americas
Scotland
Netherlands
Institutions
Bodleian Library
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