Kirjahaku

Featuring beautiful photographs and insightful commentary this Chinese gardening book is a must have for any gardening or zen enthusiast.Celebrating the pleasures of garden living enjoyed by the elite of late imperial China, this book brings together poetry, prose, paintings and prints from imperial China to show the many facets of life and leisure in the Chinese garden. From music to lanterns, from chess to drama, all kinds of cultural activities could be enjoyed in a garden setting, alone or with friends and family. Here, too, the garden owner and his or her companions could appreciate the changing seasons with all their variety of scent, sound and colorful blossom. No wonder that dwelling in a garden was often compared to the carefree life of a Taoist immortal. Chinese Garden Appreciation, compiled by a leading expert in Chinese garden history, incorporates many original translations of classical Chinese poetry and prose.

Examines and reassesses the life and work of Ming-era poet Ruan Dacheng. The Many Faces of Ruan Dacheng is the first monograph in English on a controversial Ming dynasty literary figure. It examines and reassesses the life and work of Ruan Dacheng (1587-1646), a poet, dramatist, and politician in the late Ming period. Ruan Dacheng was in his own time a highly regarded poet, although he is now better known as a dramatist. He was notorious as a "treacherous official" of the Ming-Qing transition, and as a result, his literary work has been neglected and undervalued. Hardie argues that Ruan's literary work is of much greater significance in the history of Chinese literature than has generally been recognized since his own time. Ruan, rather than being a transgressive figure, is actually a very typical late Ming literatus, and as such his attitudes towards identity and authenticity can add to our understanding of these issues in late Ming intellectual history. These insights will impact the cultural and intellectual history of late imperial China.