Dou Xian was a Chinese general and consort kin of the Eastern Han dynasty, famous for destroying the Xiongnu nomadic empire.
The Classic of Poetry, also Shijing or Shih-ching, translated variously as the Book of Songs, Book of Odes, or simply known as the Odes or Poetry, is the oldest existing collection of Chinese poetry, comprising 305 works dating from the 11th to 7th centuries BC. It is one of the "Five Classics" traditionally said to have been compiled by Confucius, and has been studied and memorized by scholars in China and neighboring countries over two millennia. It is also a rich source of chengyu that are still a part of learned discourse and even everyday language in modern Chinese. Since the Qing dynasty, its rhyme patterns have also been analysed in the study of Old Chinese phonology.
Colonies in antiquity were post-Iron Age city-states founded from a mother-city or metropolis rather than a territory-at-large. Bonds between a colony and its metropolis often remained close, and took specific forms during the period of classical antiquity. Generally, colonies founded by the ancient Phoenicians, Carthage, Rome, Alexander the Great and his successors remained tied to their metropolis, though Greek colonies of the Archaic and Classical eras were sovereign and self-governing from their inception. While Greek colonies were often founded to solve social unrest in the mother-city by expelling a part of the population, Hellenistic, Roman, Carthaginian, and Han Chinese colonies were used for trade, expansion and empire-building.
Liu Xin, courtesy name Zijun, was a Chinese astronomer, classicist, imperial librarian, mathematician, and politician during the Western Han and Xin dynasties. He later changed his name to Liu Xiu (劉秀) due to the naming taboo of Emperor Ai of Han. He was the son of Imperial librarian Liu Xiang and an associate of other eminent thinkers such as the philosopher Huan Tan. Liu was a prominent supporter of the Old Text classics.
The Book of Documents or the Classic of History, is one of the Five Classics of ancient Chinese literature. It is a collection of rhetorical prose attributed to figures of ancient China, and served as the foundation of Chinese political philosophy for over two millennia.
The Book of Han is a history of China finished in 111 CE, covering the Western, or Former Han dynasty from the first emperor in 206 BCE to the fall of Wang Mang in 23 CE. The work was composed by Ban Gu (32–92 CE), an Eastern Han court official, with the help of his sister Ban Zhao, continuing the work of their father, Ban Biao. They modelled their work on the Records of the Grand Historian, a cross-dynastic general history, but theirs was the first in this annals-biography form to cover a single dynasty. It is the best source, sometimes the only one, for many topics such as literature in this period. The Book of Han is also called the Book of the Former Han to distinguish it from the Book of the Later Han which covers the Eastern Han period (25–220 CE), and was composed in the fifth century by Fan Ye (398–445 CE).
Huan Tan was a Chinese philosopher, poet, and politician of the Western Han and its short-lived interregnum between AD 9 and 23, known as the Xin dynasty.
The Juyan Lake is a former lake in the Gobi Desert. It is located in the western part of Inner Mongolia, in Ejin Banner of the Alxa League, near the border with Mongolia. Gashuun Nuur had an area of 267 km2 (103 sq mi) in 1958, of 213 km2 (82 sq mi) in 1960, and dried up in 1961. The eastern lake reappeared in 2005. As of August 2012, the area of the lake is 38 km2 (15 sq mi).
Peter Francis Kornicki FBA is an English Japanologist. He is Emeritus Professor of Japanese at Cambridge University and Emeritus Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge. He is particularly known for his studies of the history of the book and of languages in Asia.
Mark Edward Lewis is an American sinologist and historian of ancient China.
Given textual and archaeological evidence, it is thought that thousands of Europeans lived in Imperial China during the Yuan dynasty. These were people from countries traditionally belonging to the lands of Christendom during the High to Late Middle Ages who visited, traded, performed Christian missionary work, or lived in China. This occurred primarily during the second half of the 13th century and the first half of the 14th century, coinciding with the rule of the Mongol Empire, which ruled over a large part of Eurasia and connected Europe with their Chinese dominion of the Yuan dynasty. Whereas the Byzantine Empire centered in Greece and Anatolia maintained rare incidences of correspondence with the Tang, Song and Ming dynasties of China, the Holy See sent several missionaries and embassies to the early Mongol Empire as well as to Khanbaliq, the capital of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty of China. These contacts with the West were preceded by rare interactions between the Han dynasty and Hellenistic Greeks and Romans.
The Zhuangzi is an ancient Chinese text that is one of the foundational texts of Taoism, alongside the Tao Te Ching, Neiye, Wenzi and Liezi. It was written during the late Warring States period (476–221 BC) and is named for its traditional author, Zhuang Zhou, who is customarily known as "Zhuangzi".
Bamboo and wooden strips are long, narrow strips of wood or bamboo, each typically holding a single column of several dozen brush-written characters. They were the main media for writing documents in China before the widespread introduction of paper during the first two centuries AD.
Edwin George "Ted" Pulleyblank was a Canadian sinologist. He was a professor who taught at the University of British Columbia. He was known for his studies of the historical phonology of Chinese.
The translation of Han dynasty government titles into English varies within the academic community. This page is a reference to compare renderings of Chinese official titles by different sinologists.
Fangmatan is an archeological site located near Tianshui in China's Gansu province. The site was located within the Qin state, and includes several burials dating from the Warring States period through to the early Western Han.
Wilt L. Idema is a Dutch scholar and Sinologist who taught at University of Leiden and Harvard University (2000–13), presently emeritus at both universities. He specializes in Chinese literature, with interests in early Chinese drama, Chinese women's literature of the premodern period, Chinese popular narrative ballads, and early development of Chinese vernacular fiction.
Anthony François Paulus Hulsewé was a Dutch Sinologist and scholar best known for his studies of ancient Chinese law, particularly that of the Han dynasty.
Carmen Blacker OBE FBA was a British Japanologist. She was a lecturer in Japanese at the University of Cambridge.
Arthur Richard Valentine Cooper (1916–1988) was a British codebreaker, who became a translator of Chinese literature after retirement. He is best remembered for his translations of the Tang dynasty poets Li Bai and Du Fu, but is also known for his original research on the early Chinese script.
