Past Awards

Picturing the True Form investigates the long-neglected visual culture of Daoism, China’s primary indigenous religion, from the tenth through thirteenth centuries. In this richly illustrated book, Huang provides a comprehensive mapping of Daoist images and reveals three central modes of Daoist symbolism. She shows how Daoist image-making goes beyond the traditional dichotomy of text and image to incorporate writings in image design. It is these particular features that distinguish Daoist visual culture from its Buddhist counterpart.

Sometime before 1579, Zhou Lujing published a series of lavishly illustrated books that were the first multigenre painting manuals in Chinese history. Their popularity was immediate and their contents and format were widely reprinted and disseminated. Art by the Book describes how such publications accommodated the cultural taste and demands of the general public, and both gratified and shaped their sensibilities. As a commodity of early modern China, when cultural standing was measured by a person’s command of literati taste and lore, painting manuals provided nonelite readers with a device for enhancing social capital.

This study of late-Ming material culture focuses on an erotic fiction genre, the marketing and consuming strategies behind it, and the Daoist allegory contained within. Specific features of the presentation of eroticism in these novellas include the legitimation of sexuality in cosmological thinking, the moralization and politicalization of sexuality, the medical discourse on sexuality, pleasure prescribed by ars erotica, and the religious dimension of sexuality.

Featuring eleven original papers presented at Ming Taizu and His Times, an international conference hosted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong and supported by the Geiss Hsu Foundation, the book is one of the most substantial collections of essays on the Ming founder. It offers new interpretations on Ming Taizu, the challenges he faced, the resources he drew upon, and his successes and failures in meeting those difficulties. The collection as a whole opens the ways for a reconsideration and reevaluation of the founder of the Ming Dynasty.

This collection of essays reveals the Ming court as an arena of competition and negotiation, where a large cast of actors pursued individual and corporate ends, personal agency shaped protocol and style, and diverse people, goods, and tastes converged. Rather than observing an immutable set of traditions, court culture underwent frequent reinterpretation and rearticulation, processes driven by immediate personal imperatives, mediated through social, political, and cultural interaction.

The most detailed account of local Ming government available in English, Local Administration in Ming China traces the origins and evolution of the lowest level of administrative offices over the course of the dynasty. It starts with the Ming founder’s experiments with using members of the local elite to collect taxes and goes on to the increased reliance on magistrates and prefects sent out from the center. The story concludes with the fiscal problems at the end of the dynasty.

The founder of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), Zhu Yuanzhang, was one of the most colorful rulers in China’s long imperial history. His rise from poverty, participation in a millenarian movement, expulsion of the Mongols, unification of the empire, three decades of tumultuous rule, paranoia, and bloody purges are all the stuff of legend. Long Live the Emperor! brings together twenty essays examining how his stormy career has been interpreted in politics, the arts, outside of China, and in our own time.

This bound, photocopied, bilingual volume records the proceedings of the international conference held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in March 2006. Supported by the Geiss Hsu Foundation, the conference examined the personality and career of Zhu Yuanzhang, founder of the Ming Dynasty. It features 31 thematically-related articles, eleven of which were later published by the Chinese University Press as Ming Taizu’s Ideas on Statecraft and Their Implementation.