Scholars have generally agreed that the story of New Text Confucianism in late imperial China centers on K'ang Yu-wei and the late nineteenth-century political reforms he took credit for after fleeing China in 1898. In this important new book, Benjamin Elman explores the roots of New Text ideas and shows that Confucians first dissented from the orthodox raison d'etre of the imperial state over three hundred years earlier, during the transition from the late Ming to early Ch'ing dynasties. New Text scholars, although not revolutionary, stood for new forms of belief, and they challenged the authenticity of classical sources upon which much orthodox political discourse had been based. Their notions of historical change proved to be important stepping stones toward an influential New Text vision of social and political transformation that climaxed in the 1898 reform movement. Elman examines the conflicting New Text versus Old Text portraits of Confucius in order to gain a more precise grasp of classical studies in imperial China as the ideological source for the "constitutionality" of the Confucian imperium. Central to his argument is the discovery that kinship organizations in pre-modern China played an important role in fostering schools of learning such as the Ch'ang-chou New Text school. Accordingly, this study affords us a unique perspective on how gentry sought to impose their agenda on the state in an effort to weather the great changes occurring during the Ming and Ch'ing dynasties.

Classicism, Politics, and Kinship: The Ch'ang-chou School of New Text Confucianism in Late Imperial China

History

Elman, Benjamin A.

Asia

University of California Press

In this multidimensional analysis, Benjamin A. Elman uses over a thousand newly available examination records from the Yuan, Ming, and Ch'ing dynasties, 1315-1904, to explore the social, political, and cultural dimensions of the civil examination system, one of the most important institutions in Chinese history. For over five hundred years, the most important positions within the dynastic government were usually filled through these difficult examinations, and every other year some one to two million people from all levels of society attempted them. Covering the late imperial system from its inception to its demise, Elman revises our previous understanding of how the system actually worked, including its political and cultural machinery, the unforeseen consequences when it was unceremoniously scrapped by modernist reformers, and its long-term historical legacy. He argues that the Ming-Ch'ing civil examinations from 1370 to 1904 represented a substantial break with T'ang-Sung dynasty literary examinations from 650 to 1250. Late imperial examinations also made "Tao Learning," Neo-Confucian learning, the dynastic orthodoxy in official life and in literati culture. The intersections between elite social life, popular culture, and religion that are also considered reveal the full scope of the examination process throughout the late empire.

A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (Philip E. Lilienthal Book)

In On Their Own Terms, Benjamin A. Elman offers a much-needed synthesis of early Chinese science during the Jesuit period (1600-1800) and the modern sciences as they evolved in China under Protestant influence (1840s-1900).
By 1600 Europe was ahead of Asia in producing basic machines, such as clocks, levers, and pulleys, that would be necessary for the mechanization of agriculture and industry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Elman shows, Europeans still sought from the Chinese their secrets of producing silk, fine textiles, and porcelain, as well as large-scale tea cultivation. Chinese literati borrowed in turn new algebraic notations of Hindu-Arabic origin, Tychonic cosmology, Euclidian geometry, and various computational advances. 
Since the middle of the nineteenth century, imperial reformers, early Republicans, Guomindang party cadres, and Chinese Communists have all prioritized science and technology. In this book, Elman gives a nuanced account of the ways in which native Chinese science evolved over four centuries, under the influence of both Jesuit and Protestant missionaries. In the end, he argues, the Chinese produced modern science on their own terms.

On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550-1900

Harvard University Press

Historians of science and Sinologists have long needed a unified narrative to describe the Chinese development of modern science, medicine, and technology since 1600. They welcomed the appearance in 2005 of Benjamin Elman's masterwork, On Their Own Terms. Now Elman has retold the story of the Jesuit impact on late imperial China, circa 1600-1800, and the Protestant era in early modern China from the 1840s to 1900 in a concise and accessible form ideal for the classroom. This coherent account of the emergence of modern science in China places that emergence in historical context for both general students of modern science and specialists of China.

A Cultural History of Modern Science in China (New Histories of Science, Technology, And Medicine)

Historians of science and Sinologists have long needed a unified narrative to describe the Chinese development of modern science, medicine, and technology since 1600. They welcomed the appearance in 2005 of Benjamin Elman's masterwork, On Their Own Terms. Now Elman has retold the story of the Jesuit impact on late imperial China, circa 1600-1800, and the Protestant era in early modern China from the 1840s to 1900 in a concise and accessible form ideal for the classroom. This coherent account of the emergence of modern science in China places that emergence in historical context for both general students of modern science and specialists of China.

A Cultural History of Modern Science in China (New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine)

pp. 368, "From Philosophy to Philology is an indispensable work on the intellectual life of China? literati in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While there was not a scientific revolution in China, there was an intellectual one. The shock of the Manchu conquest and the collapse of the Ming dynasty in 1644 led to a…

From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Harvard East Asian Monographs)

Americas

Harvard University Asia Center

From Philosophy to Philology is an indispensable work on the intellectual life of China’s literati in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While there was not a scientific revolution in China, there was an intellectual one. The shock of the Manchu conquest and the collapse of the Ming dynasty in 1644 led to a rejection of the moral self-cultivation that dominated intellectual life under the Ming. China’s scholars, particularly in the Yangzi River Basin, sought to restore China’s greatness by recapturing the wisdom of the ancients from the Warring States period (403–221 B.C.) and the Former Han dynasty (202 B.C.–9 A.D.), much as Renaissance Europe rediscovered the Greeks and Romans. But in China scholars faced the daunting task of determining which of many editions of the Classics were the true originals and which were forged additions of later centuries. 
The ensuing search for authentic texts led to the founding of academies and libraries, the compiling of bibliographies, the rise of printing of editions of the Classics and Histories and commentaries on their components, the study of ancient inscriptions, and a two-hundred-year effort to discover and discard forged texts. In the process rigorous standards of scholarly training were adopted, and scholarship became a full-time profession distinct from gentry farmers or imperial officials.

From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (HARVARD EAST ASIAN SERIES)

During China's late imperial period (roughly 1400-1900 CE), men would gather by the millions every two or three years outside official examination compounds sprinkled across China. Only one percent of candidates would complete the academic regimen that would earn them a post in the administrative bureaucracy. Civil Examinations assesses the role of education, examination, and China's civil service in fostering the world's first professional class based on demonstrated knowledge and skill.
While millions of men dreamed of the worldly advancement an imperial education promised, many more wondered what went on inside the prestigious walled-off examination compounds. As Benjamin A. Elman reveals, what occurred was the weaving of a complex social web. Civil examinations had been instituted in China as early as the seventh century CE, but in the Ming and Qing eras they were the nexus linking the intellectual, political, and economic life of imperial China. Local elites and members of the court sought to influence how the government regulated the classical curriculum and selected civil officials. As a guarantor of educational merit, civil examinations served to tie the dynasty to the privileged gentry and literati classes--both ideologically and institutionally.
China did away with its classical examination system in 1905. But this carefully balanced and constantly contested piece of social engineering, worked out over the course of centuries, was an early harbinger of the meritocratic regime of college boards and other entrance exams that undergirds higher education in much of the world today.

Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China

From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Univ of California Los Angeles

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Elman, Benjamin A.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Elman, Benjamin A.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Elman, Benjamin A.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Classicism, Politics, and Kinship: The Ch'ang-chou School of New Text Confucianism in Late Imperial China

A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (Philip E. Lilienthal Book)

On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550-1900

A Cultural History of Modern Science in China (New Histories of Science, Technology, And Medicine)

A Cultural History of Modern Science in China (New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine)

From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Harvard East Asian Monographs)

From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (HARVARD EAST ASIAN SERIES)

Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China

From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China

From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China