Past Awards

The Geiss Hsu Foundation supported the publication of this volume of 29 essays derived from lectures and papers presented at the Ming China: Courts and Contacts, 1400–1450 conference, held in 2014 in conjunction with the Ming: 50 Years that Changed China exhibition at the British Museum.

In imperial China, intellectuals devoted years of their lives to passing examinations to obtain a civil service position. This traditional employment of the literati class conferred social power and moral legitimacy, but changing circumstances forced many to seek alternative careers. Politically engaged but excluded from traditional bureaucratic roles, creative writers authored critiques of state power in the form of fiction, showing that as the literati class grappled with its own increasing marginalization, they began to imagine possibilities for a new political order.

This book is the definitive study of imperial Chinese local gazetteers, one of the most important sources for premodern Chinese studies. Methodologically innovative, it represents a major contribution to the history of books, publishing, reading, and society. By examining how gazetteers were read, Joseph R. Dennis illustrates their significance in local societies and national discourses. His analysis of how gazetteers were initiated and produced reconceptualizes the geography of imperial Chinese publishing.

Ancient Chinese halls are celebrated for their majestic rooflines. However, the visual impact of these structures comes chiefly from their ceramic ornament. Clarence Eng cogently argues that these important ceramics be studied in their own right. He introduces the aesthetics, history and technology of Chinese architectural ceramics, demonstrates that similar levels of skilled expertise were applied both to glazed and unglazed ornament, and describes their contribution to structures designed primarily to delight the viewer, such as screen walls and pagodas.

Screen of Kings is the first book in any language to examine the cultural role of the regional aristocracy or ‘kings’ – relatives of the emperors – in Ming dynasty China (1368–1644). Through an investigation of their patronage of architecture, calligraphy, painting and other art forms, and through examination of the contents of their splendid and recently excavated tombs, this innovative study puts the aristocracy back at the heart of accounts of China’s cultural and artistic histories, from which they have until very recently been excluded. 

When is a landscape more than a landscape? This is a richly illustrated study of an important genre of Ming-dynasty Chinese painting in which landscapes are actually disguised portraits that celebrate an individual and his achievements, ambitions, and tastes in an open effort to win recognition, support, and social status. In this unique study, Anne de Coursey Clapp presents a broad view of these commemorative landscape paintings, including antecedents in the Song and Yuan dynasties.

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.