Cultural Enrichment Research Articles

Reviewed by: Capital Cities and Urban Form in Pre-modern China: Luoyang, 1038 BCE to 938 CE by Victor Cunrui Xiong Dong Wang (bio) Victor Cunrui Xiong. Capital Cities and Urban Form in Pre-modern China: Luoyang, 1038 bce to 938 ce. London: Routledge, 2017. viii, 299 pp. Hardcover $170.00, ISBN 978-1-138-64814-2. Recent publications show that scholars in the China field pay growing attention to China's second or third-tier cities, especially those that form the heartland of Chinese civilization. The book under review, by Victor Cunrui Xiong, a highly prolific historian of early and medieval China, also ventures beyond metropolises such as Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, and Guangzhou that offer foreign scholars fewer obstacles and well-established background knowledge. With a nod to Rome, Italy and to other Chinese cities, Xiong's historical study focuses on Luoyang from 1038 b.c.e. to 938 c.e.—the imperial and divine capital of thirteen Chinese dynasties on which the expanse of the Yi-Luo river basin converges. Located in the western part of today's Henan Province, Luoyang enjoyed strategic importance in history on the North China Plain. A work of diligence and sound intellect, Xiong's thorough book examines Luoyang's urban layout, landmark structures, demography, and administrative organization as well as its political, economic, social, religious, and cultural life before the eleventh century. The splendor of early Luoyang can only be imagined today. In Victor Xiong's words, "Luoyang was not merely a Weberian 'princely residence,' but a world-class urban center of political power, social interaction, business transactions, and cultural enrichment" (p. 53). Composed of eight main chapters in chronological order, the book narrates Luoyang's rise and fall and role over nearly two millennia, grounded [End Page 156] in comprehensive archaeological findings, historical texts, epigraphy, as well as other primary and secondary sources. Chapter 1 traces the morphology and founding of Luoyang to Luoyi during the Western Zhou (1021–771 b.c.e.)—the "center of all under the heaven" and the perfect royal residence close to heaven as King Wu, his brother the Duke of Zhou, and King Cheng all claimed in the eleventh century b.c.e. By the Eastern Zhou period (770–256 b.c.e.), two urban centers or twin cities, known as Wangcheng and Chengzhou, emerged in, respectively, the western and eastern areas of Luoyi, in which resided luminaries and officials alongside commoners, including forced migrants of the ex-Shang subjects. Three hundred years after the demise of the Zhou, China's longest dynasty that lasted for eight hundred years, Luoyang was chosen by the Guangwu emperor, Liu Xiu, to become the capital of the Eastern Han (25–220 c.e.) dynasty—the topic of chapter 2. Enclosed in walls with a total area of about 10 square kilometers, Luoyang matched the glory of its contemporary Rome during the first and second centuries. Eastern Han Luoyang, counting a population of approximately 200,000 within its inner city and one million people in its close vicinity, was the largest city in the world at the time. Extravagant palaces, imperial parks, and a ritual network of structures for worship were constructed, making Luoyang an important hub for the worship of Daoist deities and the practice of monastic Buddhism. The "two great polities of Rome and Han China were a magnificent match," as Rafe de Crespigny has pointed out in his Fire over Luoyang: A History of the Later Han Dynasty 23–220 AD (p. 509). During the reign of Emperor He (r. 88–105 c.e.), however, Luoyang fell prey to conflict between the court eunuchs and imperial consort relatives that precipitated mutual destruction and civil war. In 190, Dong Zhuo, the regional military commander, who enthroned the puppet emperor Xian (r. 189–220 c.e.), imposed the westward relocation of Luoyang's residents to Chang'an (Xi'an). Amidst opposition, Dong Zhuo decided to raze Luoyang to ground, sparing nothing. Chapter 3 tells how Luoyang, although in a dilapidated condition, was saved from total oblivion when Cao Pi, Emperor Wen, in 220 c.e. founded the new regional Cao-Wei dynasty with Luoyang as its capital. Under...

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Reviewed by: Reluctant Meister: How Germany’s Past Is Shaping Its European Future by Stephen Green Klaus Neumann Reluctant Meister: How Germany’s Past Is Shaping Its European Future. By Stephen Green. London: Haus, 2014. Pp. xiii + 338. Cloth $29.95. ISBN 978-1908323682. Stephen Green, Lord Green of Hurstpierpoint, has had an illustrious and varied career. He served as chief executive officer and group chairman of the world’s third-largest bank, HSBC. From January 2011 until December 2013, he was minister of state for trade and investment in the first Cameron government. He is chair of the Natural History Museum in London. When it comes to the writing of German history, however, he is, in his own words, an “amateur without any claim to be an academic specialist” (321). While Green may lack training as a historian, he is exceptionally well read, as his account of some two thousand years of German history demonstrates. Drawing on historical scholarship and his knowledge of literature and music, he tries to explain fascism as well as contemporary Germany’s reluctance to assume the role of Europe’s political leader. Green is at pains to caution against interpreting the past through the prism of the twentieth century—and particularly, the years from 1933 to 1945. However, his history is Whiggish in that he is clearly interested in the past as a necessary precursor of the present. That becomes most apparent in his account of postwar Germany. Telescoping the past through the present, his narrative proceeds from Adolf Hitler via Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt, and Helmut Kohl to Angela Merkel. In Green’s reading, the East German experience—including the specific hopes and anxieties of East Germans—becomes a minor detour. Unsurprisingly therefore, when writing about the end of the German Democratic Republic, he only recalls the slogan “Wir sind ein Volk” as if the East German civil rights movement’s earlier “Wir sind das Volk” had no relevance for the events of 1989. Green’s history is immensely readable. It is elegantly written and has a narrative that keeps the reader’s interest alive. Yet his book is unlikely to hold much interest for scholars of German cultural studies. The culture in which he is interested is high-brow German Kultur: from J.S. Bach to Karlheinz Stockhausen, from Arthur Schopenhauer to Jürgen Habermas, and from H.J.C. Grimmelshausen to Günter Grass. He wants to provide a “deeper history of the German lands” (xi), a history of ideas and mentalities that found their emblematic expressions in music, literature, [End Page 232] and painting. It is this deeper history that, in his view, is sorely needed in order to understand contemporary Germany. The author’s strong opinions and his particular brand of history will not be to everyone’s liking. This reviewer, for one, was troubled by the fact that Green’s views of Germany’s past are colored by his unadulterated admiration for the country, its people and, most importantly, its Kultur. Perhaps only a contemporary British writer could get away with statements such as “There is no culture on the planet greater than that of Germany” (xi) or “the contribution of Germany to human cultural enrichment … is unsurpassed by any of the great Eurasian cultures” (85). For all his knowledge about German Kultur, Green shows no sustained interest in what “new” cultural historians have had to say about twentieth-century Germany. He frequently refers to German “consciousness,” “social psychology,” “self-awareness,” “psyche,” and “folk memory” as if these were unproblematic categories, and as if they could be deduced from the operas of Richard Wagner, the plays of Heinrich von Kleist, and the art works of Anselm Kiefer. He concludes a section in which he discusses the writings of Heinrich Böll and the music of Hans Werner Henze, among others, by saying: “this is the story of a society which was increasingly coming face to face with its past” (267). His is largely the story of an intellectual and artistic elite; in order to understand “society,” we need social and cultural history at least as much as an analysis of contemporary classical music and Nobel Prize winning literature...

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Cultural Enrichment Research Articles

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Cultural Enrichment Research Articles

Related Topics

Articles published on Cultural Enrichment

Ментальные и этнопсихологические особенности тувинцев в системе детерминант развития Республики Тыва (на примере этнотуризма)

ДОСЛІДЖЕННЯ УКРАЇНСЬКО-ТЮРКСЬКИХ ЗВ’ЯЗКІВ ЯК ІНСТРУМЕНТ КУЛЬТУРНОЇ ДИПЛОМАТІЇ

Exit School and its Outcomes on Health-Related Fitness

TD/GC\u2013MS analysis of volatile markers emitted from mono- and co-cultures of Enterobacter cloacae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa in artificial sputum

I Tweet, You Tweet, (S)He Tweets

La creatividad en el sector turístico americano y europeo: Caso Croacia

A Reinvented Community: The Case of Gamcheon Culture Village

‘Class and Gender as predictors of study abroad participation among US liberal arts college Students’

Translation as a means of constructing cultures: philosophical foregrounding

THE LONGITUDINAL IMPACT OF A CULTURAL ENRICHMENT PROGRAM ON PERFORMANCE METRICS OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDENTS IN SECONDARY SCHOOL

DIDACTIC POTENTIAL OF PUPILS UPBRINGING BY MEANS OF LITARATURE WORKS IN EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS OF WESTERN UKRAINIAN DIASPORA

Motivations of educational tourists in non-English-speaking countries: the role of languages

THE IMPORTANCE OF BUILDING CULTURAL BRIDGES BETWEEN EUROPE AND EGYPT. THE ROLL OF TOURISM

DIGNITY PROMOTED OR VIOLATED: HOW DOES THE DEAF PERSON INCLUDED PERCEIVE IT?

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