Mark Edward Lewis

Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Chinese Culture Mark Edward Lewis

The geography of the northern and southern dynasties -- The rise of the great families -- Military dynasticism in the northern and southern dynasties -- Cities in the northern and southern dynasties -- Rural society in the northern and southern dynasties -- China and the outside world in the northern and southern dynasties -- Kinship in the northern and southern dynasties -- Institutional religions in the northern and southern dynasties -- The literary field of the northern and southern dynasties

The Northern and Southern Dynasties

China Between Empires

Dieter Kuhn

In 221 B.C. the First Emperor of Qin unified what would become the heart of a Chinese empire whose major features would endure for two millennia. In the first of a six-volume series on the history of imperial China, Lewis highlights the key challenges facing the court officials and scholars who set about governing an empire of such scale and diversity.

Qin and Han

The Early Chinese Empires

The Tang dynasty is often called China’s “golden age,” a period of commercial, religious, and cultural connections from Korea and Japan to the Persian Gulf, and a time of unsurpassed literary creativity. Mark Lewis captures a dynamic era in which the empire reached its greatest geographical extent under Chinese rule, painting and ceramic arts flourished, women played a major role both as rulers and in the economy, and China produced its finest lyric poets in Wang Wei, Li Bo, and Du Fu. The Chinese engaged in extensive trade on sea and land. Merchants from Inner Asia settled in the capital, while Chinese entrepreneurs set off for the wider world, the beginning of a global diaspora. The emergence of an economically and culturally dominant south that was controlled from a northern capital set a pattern for the rest of Chinese imperial history. Poems celebrated the glories of the capital, meditated on individual loneliness in its midst, and described heroic young men and beautiful women who filled city streets and bars. Despite the romantic aura attached to the Tang, it was not a time of unending peace. In 756, General An Lushan led a revolt that shook the country to its core, weakening the government to such a degree that by the early tenth century, regional warlordism gripped many areas, heralding the decline of the Great Tang.

Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Chinese Culture Mark Edward Lewis

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