Timothy Brook

Associate Professor of History Timothy Brook

China's Last Empire: The Great Quing William T. Rowe --

The Troubled Empire

Jérôme Bourgon

Gregory Blue

In Beijing in 1904, multiple murderer Wang Weiqin became one of the last to suffer the extreme punishment known as lingchi, called by Western observers "death by a thousand cuts." This is the first book to explore the history, iconography, and legal contexts of Chinese tortures and executions from the 10th century until lingchi's abolition in 1905.

Death by a Thousand Cuts

Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi

Opium Regimes draws on a range of research to show that the opium trade was not purely a British operation, but involved Chinese merchants and state agents, and Japanese imperial agents as well.

China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952

Opium Regimes

Harvard University Press

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China, Buddhists and Confucians alike flooded local Buddhist monasteries with donations. As gentry numbers grew faster than the imperial bureaucracy, traditional Confucian careers were closed to many; but visible philanthropy could publicize elite status outside the state realm. Actively sought by fundraising abbots, such patronage affected institutional Buddhism. After exploring the relation of Buddhism to Ming Neo-Confucianism, the growth of tourism to Buddhist sites, and the mechanisms and motives for charitable donations, Timothy Brook studies three widely separated and economically dissimilar counties. He draws on rich data in monastic gazetteers to examine the patterns and social consequences of patronage.

Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late-Ming China

Praying for Power

This unique collection of reworked and heavily illustrated essays, by one of the leading scholars of Chinese history, re-examines the relationship between the present day state and society in China.

Associate Professor of History Timothy Brook

Books

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