Peter Kees Bol delves into the intellectual transitions and cultural practices of China’s national and local elites across centuries. His scholarship explores how these elites engaged with classical texts and navigated shifting cultural landscapes. Bol uniquely blends historical inquiry with advanced geospatial analysis, pioneering new methods for understanding China’s deep past. His work offers profound insights into the evolution of Chinese culture and society, framed within a sophisticated geographical and historical context.
In premodern China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, just as in the far less culturally cohesive countries composing the West of the Middle Ages, enslavement was an assumed condition of servitude warranting little examination, as the power and profits it afforded to the slaver made it a convention pursued unreflectively.
Bridges, the least known and understood of China's many wonders, are one of its most striking and resilient feats of architectural prowess. Chinese Bridges brings together a thorough look at these marvels from one of the world's leading experts on Chinese culture and historical geography, Ronald G. Knapp.While many consider bridges to be merely utilitarian, the bridges of China move beyond that stereotype, as many are undeniably dramatic, even majestic and daring. Chinese Bridges illustrates in detail 20 well-preserved ancient bridges, along with descriptions and essays on the distinctive architectural elements shared by the various designs. For the first time in an English-language book, Chinese Bridges records scores of newly discovered bridges across China's vast landscape, illustrated with over 400 color photographs, as well as woodblock prints, historic images, paintings and line drawings.