Ancient Chinese History Research Articles

Analysis of the Teaching of Ancient Chinese History in the Heritage Conservation Technology Major

Ancient Chinese history is an important part of the curriculum of the Heritage Conservation Technology major. Students can better understand the history of cultural relics and improve their humanistic literacy, which will help them in restoring cultural relics. At present, there are numerous challenges in teaching ancient Chinese history in the Heritage Conservation Technology major. These challenges necessitate the development of effective teaching reform strategies. This paper outlines these challenges and explores effective teaching reform strategies to provide a reference for educators.

Transliteration in Chinese-to-English Translation from the Perspective of Xuanzang's "Five Principles of Non-Translation"

Xuanzang, a renowned translator of Buddhist scriptures in ancient Chinese history, advocated the use of transliteration in his translation theory, which is primarily reflected in his "Five Principles of Non-Translation". These principles primarily apply to five aspects: mysterious terms, polysemous words, borrowed words, conventionally translated terms, and special Buddhist terminology. This article delves into the transliteration methods employed in translating Chinese to other languages, drawing on the "Five Principles of Non-Translation". It examines the essence of this theory and its contemporary feasibility, highlighting the value of Xuanzang's principles.

Curating the Chinese ancient book catalogs: Leveraging the dual roles of humanities scholars as experts and users in collaborative practice

AbstractChinese ancient book catalogs are important cultural heritage and academic resources for the study of ancient Chinese history and culture. These catalogs need to be curated so that their value can be fully exploited in today's digital environment. This study is based on a collaborative curation project where eight representative ancient catalogs were curated into a diachronic dataset and tools to discover and analyze the data were developed. We reviewed literature and consulted humanities scholars to derive the characteristics and curation requirements of the ancient catalogs. A collaborative model was proposed based on the requirements to guide the curation process. This model reveals the duality of humanities scholars' role in collaborative curation and depicts main curation activities including metadata and description, appraisal and selection, data processing, developing tools, access and use, and evolution. Lessons learned from the curation practice include two main issues—project personnel and humanities scholars' acceptance of visualization. The study also yields a dataset and a set of tools that can be directly used by scholars interested in knowledge organization and ancient catalog related topics.

The Inheritance and Innovation of The Knowledge System in Ancient Chinese Art History

The Inheritance and Innovation of The Knowledge System in Ancient Chinese Art History

Ancient Chinese Character Recognition with Improved Swin-Transformer and Flexible Data Enhancement Strategies.

The decipherment of ancient Chinese scripts, such as oracle bone and bronze inscriptions, holds immense significance for understanding ancient Chinese history, culture, and civilization. Despite substantial progress in recognizing oracle bone script, research on the overall recognition of ancient Chinese characters remains somewhat lacking. To tackle this issue, we pioneered the construction of a large-scale image dataset comprising 9233 distinct ancient Chinese characters sourced from images obtained through archaeological excavations. We propose the first model for recognizing the common ancient Chinese characters. This model consists of four stages with Linear Embedding and Swin-Transformer blocks, each supplemented by a CoT Block to enhance local feature extraction. We also advocate for an enhancement strategy, which involves two steps: firstly, conducting adaptive data enhancement on the original data, and secondly, randomly resampling the data. The experimental results, with a top-one accuracy of 87.25% and a top-five accuracy of 95.81%, demonstrate that our proposed method achieves remarkable performance. Furthermore, through the visualizing of model attention, it can be observed that the proposed model, trained on a large number of images, is able to capture the morphological characteristics of ancient Chinese characters to a certain extent.

An unsupervised automatic organization method for Professor Shirakawa’s hand-notated documents of oracle bone inscriptions

As one of the most influential Chinese cultural researchers in the second half of the twentieth-century, Professor Shirakawa is active in the research field of ancient Chinese characters. He has left behind many valuable research documents, especially his hand-notated oracle bone inscriptions (OBIs) documents. OBIs are one of the world’s oldest characters and were used in the Shang Dynasty about 3600 years ago for divination and recording events. The organization of OBIs is not only helpful in better understanding Prof. Shirakawa’s research and further study of OBIs in general and their importance in ancient Chinese history. This paper proposes an unsupervised automatic organization method to organize Prof. Shirakawa’s OBIs and construct a handwritten OBIs data set for neural network learning. First, a suite of noise reduction is proposed to remove strangely shaped noise to reduce the data loss of OBIs. Secondly, a novel segmentation method based on the supervised classification of OBIs regions is proposed to reduce adverse effects between characters for more accurate OBIs segmentation. Thirdly, a unique unsupervised clustering method is proposed to classify the segmented characters. Finally, all the same characters in the hand-notated OBIs documents are organized together. The evaluation results show that noise reduction has been proposed to remove noises with an accuracy of 97.85%, which contains number information and closed-loop-like edges in the dataset. In addition, the accuracy of supervised classification of OBIs regions based on our model achieves 85.50%, which is higher than eight state-of-the-art deep learning models, and a particular preprocessing method we proposed improves the classification accuracy by nearly 11.50%. The accuracy of OBIs clustering based on supervised classification achieves 74.91%. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed unsupervised automatic organization of Prof. Shirakawa’s hand-notated OBIs documents. The code and datasets are available at http://www.ihpc.se.ritsumei.ac.jp/obidataset.html.

Evol project: a comprehensive online platform for quantitative analysis of ancient literature

Quantitative cultural studies have witnessed a surge with the rapid development of computer technology in recent years. Since ancient literature constitutes a long-time-span repository for human culture, with quantitative methods and ancient texts, scholars can study the genesis and progression of human history and society across historical epochs from digital perspectives. Nevertheless, traditional humanities scholars often lack the requisite technical skills, creating a demand for interactive platforms. This paper introduces the Evol platform—an online tool designed for the quantitative analysis of ancient literature. Equipped with various analysis functions and visualization tools, the Evol platform allows users to quantify literary documents through intuitive online interaction. Using this platform, we investigated three cases of cultural evolution in ancient Chinese history: (1) the changing attitude of the government towards nomadic ethnic groups; (2) the formulation and propagation of an allusion phrase related to the Battle of Muye; (3) the influence of the Book of Changes across diverse cultural domains. By showcasing cases across diverse semantic units and topics, Evol demonstrates its potential in providing efficient and low-cost experimental tools catering to the realms of culturomics, history, and philology.

Diferencias e integración del pensamiento político entre el confucianismo y el legalismo de la antigua china

Abstract: Confucianism and Legalism are not only the two most influential ideological schools in pre-Qin China but also the main schools of thought in ancient Chinese intellectual history. This is due to their respective social nature and contrasting political values. In Pre-Qin Confucianism, rooted in the belief in the innate goodness of human nature, there is a strong emphasis on the significance of historical traditions. It promotes values such as benevolence, righteousness, propriety and wisdom, and seeks to redefine “Rite” by incorporating new values. It places great importance on the rule of virtue and aspires to achieve a state of Universal Harmony. Pre-Qin Legalism, driven by the inherent human inclination towards self-interest and personal gain, formulates a governance philosophy grounded in utilitarianism. It prioritizes the present and advocates for profound transformations through the implementation of strict “law” to attain national prosperity and military strength. As a result, ancient China formed different traditions of the rule of virtue and law, laying the foundation for the complementary nature of Confucianism and Legalism. This article analyzes the factors of differentiation and the process of integration in Confucian and legalist political philosophy, aiming to provide insights into the construction of contemporary political philosophical systems.

Historical Development in Education and Cultural Literacy of Chinese Tujia Working Songs in Chongqing

Chinese Tujia folk songs, deeply rooted in the cultural heritage of the Tujia ethnic group, serve as a living repository of history, values, and traditions. The primary objective of this study is to investigate the historical development of education and cultural literacy in Chinese Tujia working songs in Chongqing. The comprehensive literature review provides insights into the history of the Tujia ethnic group, their musical heritage, and contemporary challenges to preserving their cultural traditions. The research site includes Youyang Tujia and Miao Autonomous County, Shizhu Tujia Autonomous County, Pengshui Tujia, and Miao Autonomous County, and Qianjiang District. Key informants, including accomplished artists, academic researchers, and local experts, share their invaluable insights related to the preservation and performance of Tujia folk songs. By using the principles of music aesthetics, music ethnology, and ancient Chinese music history. The result of this study underscores the critical importance of preserving intangible cultural heritage, especially in the context of today’s rapid modernization and globalization. They highlight those traditional folk songs, like Chinese Tujia working songs, hold immense cultural and historical value. The study also provides actionable recommendations for ensuring the continued vitality of these culturally rich songs. These suggestions can guide efforts to integrate Tujia folk songs into educational curricula, support local musicians and artists, and promote cultural events.

An Experimental Plan: Teaching of Astronomical Clock Tower under View of New Liberal Arts Perspective

At the end of the 11th century, the “Astronomical Clock Tower” developed by Su Song’s team involved many scientific knowledge, advanced and complex technologies, and created many world firsts. It played an important role in the history of science and technology in China and even the world. It was the best test sample for exploring the teaching method of the history of science and technology content in the teaching reform of the undergraduate history (normal) major “Ancient Chinese History” course under the guidance of the new liberal arts and science concept. The experimental plan focuses on the common characteristics of this type of content, closely adheres to teaching objectives, fits the actual learning situation, and is based on general teaching conditions. Within the limit of class hours, it introduces the background, structure, and function, explains the principle and process of key components, analyzes ideas and methods, highlights the key points and difficulties, and strives to be interesting, easy to understand, and memorable, so that students can feel the outstanding wisdom and innovation of the sages, clarify its position and influence in the history of science and technology in China and the world, and accumulate knowledge and methods for future teaching of this type of historical content.

Discuss: Several Problems in the Chinese Ancient History Textbook of Zhu Shaohou Version

The textbook Ancient History of China edited by Zhu Shaohou and others is the most widely used textbook for the course "Chinese ancient history" of history majors in Chinese universities. This textbook has been revised multiple times in the past 40 years, but there are still many problems, such as contradictory expressions of the same problem, lack of pronunciation and meaning labeling of rare characters in ancient literature, omission of legal and diplomatic aspects in the history of Song and Yuan , inaccurate use of historical materials, and obvious untrue statements; Part of the content is outdated, neglecting the important role of maps, schematics, datasheets, and physical photos in students' construction of specific historical time and space and understanding of relevant content. These issues reveal that there is room for improvement at all stages of the compilation process of undergraduate history textbooks in Chinese universities, and it is urgent to attract the attention of the historical community and management departments.

Synergistic Improvement Earthen Mortars with Tung Oil, Sticky Rice Pulp, and Aerial Lime: Application for the Conservation of Rammed Earth Structures Damaged by Exfoliation

ABSTRACT Earthen sites are mainly made of earth and are widely located in the moist regions of south-eastern China; however, they suffer from serious damage. Sticky rice-lime mortar, one of the most important technological inventions in the ancient Chinese architectural history, are insufficient for earthen site conservation under adverse humid conditions. In this study, tung oil was used in conjunction with sticky rice pulp and aerial lime composites to evaluate the feasibility of protecting earthen sites damaged by exfoliation in moist environments. Several important experiments were conducted on a test soil as a substitute for the scarce site earth. The cohesion of the test soil with addition of tung oil (T), sticky rice pulp (R), and aerial lime (L) after 180 d was 16 times that of the untreated soil. The addition of these three materials to lean clay formed a double structure of aggregates, as determined by mercury intrusion porosimetry (MIP). The unique relationship depicting the hydraulic conductivity between TRL-treated soil and clay was uniform. Using SEM/EDS, and XRD analysis, the synergistic mechanism was primarily achieved through a TRL triangular interrelation, in which tung oil is indispensable for lean clay improvement. This study provided an effective technique for restoring deteriorated rammed earth remains made of lean clay. Two in situ pilot applications of rammed earth technology were performed on anomalous parts by multi-layer compaction to restore earth remains with potential exfoliation risk. This earth-based mortar was proved to be temporarily effective within one year of conservation.

Disentangling the cultural evolution of ancient China: a digital humanities perspective

Being recognized among the cradles of human civilization, ancient China nurtured the longest continuous academic traditions and humanistic spirits, which continue to impact today’s society. With an unprecedented large-scale corpus spanning 3000 years, this paper presents a quantitative analysis of cultural evolution in ancient China. Millions of intertextual associations are identified and modelled with a hierarchical framework via deep neural network and graph computation, thus allowing us to answer three progressive questions quantitatively: (1) What is the interaction between individual scholars and philosophical schools? (2) What are the vicissitudes of schools in ancient Chinese history? (3) How did ancient China develop a cross-cultural exchange with an externally introduced religion such as Buddhism? The results suggest that the proposed hierarchical framework for intertextuality modelling can provide sound suggestions for large-scale quantitative studies of ancient literature. An online platform is developed for custom data analysis within this corpus, which encourages researchers and enthusiasts to gain insight into this work. This interdisciplinary study inspires the re-understanding of ancient Chinese culture from a digital humanities perspective and prompts the collaboration between humanities and computer science.

Cassiae Semen improves non-alcoholic fatty liver disease through autophagy-related pathway

ObjectiveCassiae Semen (CS, Juemingzi in Chinese) has been used for thousands of years in ancient Chinese history for relieving constipation, improving liver function as well as preventing myopia. Here we aimed to elucidate the anti-steatosis effect and underlying mechanism of CS against non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). MethodsHigh-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) was used to identify the major components of CS water extract. Mice were fed with a high-fat and sugar-water (HFSW) diet to induce hepatic steatosis and then treated with CS. The anti-NAFLD effect was determined by measuring serum biomarkers and histopathology staining. Additionally, the effects of CS on cell viability and lipid metabolism in oleic acid and palmitic acid (OAPA)-treated HepG2 cells were measured. The expression of essential genes and proteins involved in lipid metabolism and autophagy signalings were measured to uncover the underlying mechanism. ResultsFive compounds, including aurantio-obtusin, rubrofusarin gentiobioside, cassiaside C, emodin and rhein were simultaneously identified in CS extract. CS not only improved the diet-induced hepatic steatosis in vivo, as indicated by decreased number and size of lipid droplets, hepatic and serum triglycerides (TG) levels, but also markedly attenuated the OAPA-induced lipid accumulation in hepatocytes. These lipid-lowering effects induced by CS were largely dependent on the inhibition of fatty acid synthase (FASN) and the activation of autophagy-related signaling, including AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), light chain 3-II (LC3-II)/ LC3-1 and autophagy-related gene5 (ATG5). ConclusionOur study suggested that CS effectively protected liver steatosis via decreasing FASN-related fatty acid synthesis and activating AMPK-mediated autophagy, which might become a promising therapeutic strategy for relieving NAFLD.

Ethnic Homology and China Identity Effect of Division-Unification Law in Ancient China

In the thousands of years of development and evolution of ancient China, sometimes it split, sometimes it unified, but after each division, there would be greater unification, which is the law of division and unification in ancient Chinese history. Why does this law come into being? The study found that there are two fundamental reasons: one is all major ethnic groups in China have common blood and ethnic origin. Second, based on this same root and homology, China complex and China identity effect were formed. The analysis of a large number of prehistoric myths and legends of Zhuang, Yao, Hun, Xianbei and many other ethnic groups, as well as the rich historical documents of the Central Plains Empire, shows that many ethnic groups that had appeared in history have consanguinity and cultural homology with the Central Plains, which was regarded as the core area of Chinese orthodox culture. Just because of the limitation of historical conditions, it was inconvenient for them to communicate with the Central Plains. As time goes on, the two sides did not understand enough and the development level was different, which gradually widened the gap.

Exploration and Practice of Ideology and Politics Education in History Courses in Colleges and Universities: Taking Chinese Ancient History as an Example

Exploration and Practice of Ideology and Politics Education in History Courses in Colleges and Universities: Taking Chinese Ancient History as an Example

Application Research of Ancient Chinese Physics History in Junior High School Physics Teaching

Application Research of Ancient Chinese Physics History in Junior High School Physics Teaching

중국 고대] 새로운 자료, 새로운 방법론, 중국고대사 연구의 진전 -2020~2021년 연구 동향과 과제-

Despite the severe COVID-19 pandemic situation since 2020, the Chinese ancient history academia in Korea has made meaningful achievements while adapting to the non-face-to-face research environment. Active exchanges with overseas academics took place research papers grew in quantity, and academically important books continued to be published.BR Amid these achievements, the trend of research related to ancient china over the past two years shows the transition to new approaches (in Chinese ancient history), which break down existing barriers between academic disciplines and which are sharing new data and various methodologies.BR Therefore, this paper intends to collect and summarize the achievements of history, archeology, philosophy, literature, and literary studies over the past two years, as much as possible, focusing on ancient Chinese history. In addition, studies on the history of disasters and environments of ancient China have been conducted considerably in the context of the corona pandemic.BR In this paper, the research achievements of the past two years are classified into ‘History of pre-Qin’, ‘History of Qin-Han empire’, and ‘Others’, and then divided into several detailed sub-topics.BR In recent new trends of researches, it is expected that the Chinese ancient history academia will achieve gradual improvements in research while exploring new methodologies with new data. And in this process, the most necessary virtue is an open attitude toward other disciplines.

Spatial patterns, causes and characteristics of the cultural landscape of the Road of Tang Poetry based on text mining: take the Road of Tang Poetry in Eastern Zhejiang as an example

The Road of Tang Poetry in Eastern Zhejiang is a poetic cultural route linked by Tang poetry which is the pinnacle of ancient Chinese poetry history, and is a cluster of cultural landscapes where nature and humanity blend together under the narrative of Tang poetry. The research has mined and collated the text information of poems, such as trails, persons, places and landscapes, in 1593 poems written by 451 poets of the Tang Dynasty in Eastern Zhejiang, and discerned the overall route of the Road of Tang Poetry in Eastern Zhejiang based on the spatial location of all the text information in GIS. The spatial distribution pattern of the cultural landscape of the Road of Tang Poetry is analyzed and summarized from four levels: natural landscape, Buddhist and Taoist cultural landscape, celebrity cultural landscape and folk cultural landscape. The complex social network relationship between “poet-person” and “poet-landscape” is shown through the Gephi tools. The four causes and two characteristics of the Road of Tang poetry in Eastern Zhejiang are explained from the perspective of the logic of mathematical statistics.

A Study of Song Dynasty Polychrome Statue-Making Techniques and Materials in the Sage Mother Hall of the Jinci Temple, Shanxi, China

The polychrome statues of the Sage Mother Hall at the Jinci Temple in Taiyuan city are recognized as one of the three masterpieces of the Jinci Temple. They are also regarded as an outstanding representative of ancient Chinese temple statues. These statues possess great historical, artistic, scientific, cultural and social values, and they are an important physical material for the study of ancient Chinese history, culture, religion, politics and economy, as well as science and technology. The internal structure, plaster layer samples and surface pigments of the polychrome statues of the Sage Mother Hall were analyzed by optical microscope (OM) scanning electron microscopy coupled with energy-dispersive X-ray spectrometry (SEM–EDS), X-ray powder diffraction (XRD), Raman spectroscopy (Raman), X-radiography and other analytical methods in order to gain an understanding of the production process and pigment composition of the polychrome statues of the Sage Mother Hall. According to the findings, the following steps were taken during the production of the polychrome statues that decorate the Sage Mother Hall at Jinci Temple: building a wooden skeleton, fixing the skeleton with rivets or twine, shaping the clay form with coarse clay, shaping the appearance with fine clay, refining the molded appearance, and white substrate layer painting. The majority of the pigments are inorganic mineral pigments: the red pigments include cinnabar and minium; the blue pigments include ultramarine; the green pigments include lavendulan; the yellow pigments include yellow ochre; the black pigments include carbon black; and the white pigments and substrate layers include white lead and lead sulfate. Some of the pigment layers can be seen in multiple layers, which indicates that over the history of the painted statues of the Sage Mother Hall, they have been subject to a series of repainting, with the more recent repainting time perhaps having taken place during the late Qing Dynasty and the following time period.