History : Asia

This new volume of the Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women, spans more than 2,000 years and recovers the stories of more than 200 women, nearly all of them unknown in the West. Empresses and consorts, nuns and shamans, women of noteriety or exemplary virtue, women of daring and women of artistic or scholarly accomplishment--all are to be found in this remarkable dictionary. more...

Price: $115.00

China is now poised to take a key role on the world stage, but in the early twentieth century the situation could not have been more different. Rana Mitter goes back to this pivotal moment in Chinese history to uncover the origins of the painful transition from a premodern past into a modern world. Mitter takes us through the resulting social turmoil and political promise, the devastating war against Japan in the 1940s, Communism and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and the new era of hope in the 1980s ended by the Tian'anmen uprising. He reveals the impetus behind the dramatic changes in Chinese culture and politics as being China's "New Culture" - a strain of thought which celebrated youth, individualism, and the heady mixture of strange and seductive new cultures from places as. far apart as America, India, and Japan. - ;China is now poised to take a key role on the world stage, but in the early twentieth century the situation could not have been more different. Rana Mitter goes back to this pivotal moment in Chinese history to uncover the origins of the painful transition from a premodern past into a modern world. By the 1920s the seemingly civilized world shaped over the last two thousand years by the legacy of the great philosopher Confucius was falling apart in the face of western imperialism and internal warfare. Chinese cities still bore the imprints of its ancient past with narrow, lanes and temples to long-worshipped gods, but these were starting to change with the influx of foreign traders, teachers, and missionaries, all eager to shape China's ancient past into a modern present. Mitter takes us through the resulting social turmoil and political promise, the devastating war against Japan in the 1940s, Communism and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and the new era of hope in the 1980s ended by the Tian'anmen uprising. He reveals the impetus behind the dramatic changes in Chinese culture and politics as being China's more...

Price: $22.00

A hundred years ago, in 1904, a British mission under Francis Younghusband, along with a formidable military escort commanded by Brigadier-General James Macdonald, entered Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. Thus nearly 150 years of British attempts from their Indian base to establish formal diplomatic relations with the ruling Tibetan theocracy culminated in the deployment of massive armed force. While the Younghusband venture failed to achieve nearly all its stated objectives, it undoubtedly marked the opening of a new era in Central Asian history the full consequences and complexities of which have yet to be revealed in full. To the steadily growing band of students of the history, nature and consequences of Anglo-Tibetan contacts, in which the Younghusband mission features so prominently, Julie Marshall’s revised and enormously expanded version of her bibliography of works relating to British relations with Tibet from 1765 to 1947, of which the first version appeared in 1977, cannot fail to be of outstanding value. Its publication is indeed an appropriate event in the Younghusband centenary. more...

Price: $125.00

Some 60 years after the Far Eastern War ended, this innovative collection brings together scholars from the UK and Japan to reappraise their respective countries' leadership in the Malaya and Burma campaigns. more...

Price: $180.00

Using official government sources, private papers and the diaries and memoirs of those involved, this book examines the impact of Younghunsband's invasion and its aftermath inside Tibet. more...

Price: $195.00