Chinese Intellectual History

An Extended Bibliography

General Studies

Ledderose, Lothar. Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Bray, Francesca, Vera Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, and Georges Métailie, ed. Graphics and Text in the Production of Technical Knowledge in China: The Warp and the Weft. Leiden: Brill, 2007.

Golas, Peter J. Picturing Technology in China: From Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015.

Wu, Hung, edited. Reinventing the Past: Archaism and Antiquarianism in Chinese Art and Visual Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010

Yung, Bell Evelyn S. Rawski, and Rubie S. Watson, eds. Harmony and Counterpoint: Ritual Music in Chinese Context.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Fong, Wen et al. Images of the Mind: Selections from the Edward L. Elliott Family and John B. Elliott Collections of Chinese Calligraphy and Painting at the Art Museum, Princeton University. Princeton: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1984.

Early and Middle Periods

Von Falkenhausen, Lothar. Suspended Music: Chime Bells in the Culture of Bronze Age China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Wu, Hung. The Wu Liang Shrine: The Ideology of Early Chinese Pictorial Art. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989.

Kieschnick, John. The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

McNair, Amy. Donors of Longmen: Faith, Politics, and Patronage in Medieval Chinese Buddhist Sculpture. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2007.

Fraser, Sarah. Performing the Visual: The Practice of Buddhist Wall Painting in China and Central Asia, 618-960. Stanford University Press, 2004.

Wang, Eugene Yuejin. Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005.

McNair, Amy. The Upright Brush: Yan Zhenqing's Calligraphy and Song Literati Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998.

Liu, Heping. “The Water Mill and Northern Song Imperial Patronage of Art, Commerce, and Science.” The Art Bulletin, vol. 84, no. 4 (2002): 566-595.

Harrist, Robert Jr. Painting and Private Life in Eleventh-Century China: Mountain Villa by Li Gonglin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Barnhart, Richard et al. Li Kung-lin's Classic of Filial Piety. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993.

Sturman, Peter C. “Cranes above Kaifeng: The Auspicious Image at the Court of Huizong.” Ars Orientalis, vol. 20 (1990): 33-68.

Bickford, Maggie. “Emperor Huizong and the Aesthetic of Agency.” Archives of Asian Art, vol. 53, (2002/2003): 71-104.

Moser, Jeffrey. Nominal Things: Bronzes in the Making of Medieval China. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2023.

Sena, Yunchiahn C. Bronze and Stone: The Cult of Antiquity in Song Dynasty China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019.

Hsu, Ya-hwei. “Reshaping Chinese Material Culture: The Revival of Antiquity in the Era of Print, 960–1279.” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2010.

Murray, Julia. “The Ladies’ Classic of Filial Piety and Southern Sung Textual Illustration: Problems of Reconstruction and Artistic Context.” Ars Orientalis, vol. 18, (1988): 95-129.

Murray, Julia. Ma Hezhi and the Illustration of the Book of Odes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Wang, Tao, ed. Mirroring China’s Past: Emperors, Scholars, and their Bronzes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.

Murray, Julia K. Mirror of Morality: Chinese Narrative Illustration and Confucian Ideology. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2007.

Huang, Shih-shan Susan. Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China. Harvard: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012.

Hammers, Roslyn. Pictures of Tilling and Weaving: Art, Labor and Technology In Song and Yuan China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Pres, 2011.

Naquin, Susan. Gods of Mount Tai: Familiarity and the Material Culture of North China, 1000-2000. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2022.

Gesterkamp, Lennert. The Heavenly Court: Daoist Temple Painting in China, 1200-1400. Leiden: Brill, 2011. 

Late Imperial Era

Lam, Joseph S. State Sacrifices and Music in Ming China. Albany: SUNY, 1998.

Clunas, Craig. Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991.

Miller, Peter and Francois Louis, edited. Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500-1800. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012.

Hay, Jonathan. Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010.

Sullivan, Michael. The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

Park, J. P. Art by the Book: Painting Manuals and the Leisure Life in Late Ming China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012.

Cahill, James. The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Painting. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Purtle, Jennifer. “Scopic Frames: Devices for Seeing China circa 1640.” Art History, no. 1 (2010): 54–73.

Bai Qianshen. Fu Shan's World: The Transformation of Chinese Calligraphy in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003.

Kleutghen, Kristina and S.E. Kile. “Seeing Through Pictures and Poetry: A History of Lenses (1681).” Late Imperial China, vol. 38, no. 1 (2017): 47-112.

Whiteman, Stephen H. Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020.

Chen, Hui-hung. “Encounters in Peoples, Religions, and Sciences: Jesuit Visual Culture in Seventeenth Century China.” PhD Diss., Brown University, 2004.

Berger, Patricia. Empire of Emptiness: Buddhist Art and Political Authority in Qing China. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003.

Foret, Philippe. Mapping Chengde: The Qing Landscape Enterprise. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000.

Ko, Dorothy. The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2017.

Chen, Kai Jun. Porcelain for the Emperor: Manufacture and Technocracy in Qing China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2023.

Corsi, Elisabetta. “Envisioning Perspective: Nian Xiyao 年希堯 (1671-1738)’s Rendering of Western Perspective in the Prologues to ‘The Science of Vision.’” In Antonino Forte and Federico Masini, edited. A Life Journey to the East: Sinological Studies in Memory of Guiliano Bertuccioli (1923-2001), 201-243. Kyoto: Scuola Italiana di Studi sull’ Asia Orientale, 2002.

Lai, Yu-chih. “Domesticating the Global and Materializing the Unknown: A Study on Album of Beasts at the Qianlong Court.” In Anna Grasskamp and Monica Juneja, ed. EuroAsian Objects: Art and Material Culture in Global Exchange, 1600-1800, 125-174. Switzerland: Springer, 2018.

Lai, Yu-chih. “Images, Knowledge and Empire: Depicting Cassowaries in the Qing Court,” Transcultural Studies, no. 1 (2013): 7-100.

Musillo, Marco, The Shining Inheritance: Italian Painters At the Qing Court, 1699-1812. Los Angeles: Getty Research Insititute, 2016.

Kleutghen, Kristina. Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in the Qing Palaces. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015.

Chiu, Wai Yee Lulu. “The Function of Western Music in the Eighteenth Century Chinese Court.” PhD Diss., Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2007.  

Yu, Hui-chun. “The Intersection of Past and Present: The Qianlong Emperor and His Ancient Bronzes.” PhD Diss., Princeton University, 2007.

Hay, Jonathan. “Culture, Ethnicity, and Empire in the Work of Two Eighteenth-Century ‘Eccentric’ Artists.” Res, vol. 35, (1999): 201-23.

Kleutghen, Kristina. “Peepboxes, Society, and Visuality in Early Modern China.” Art History, vol. 38, no. 4 (2015): 762-777.

Purtle, Jennifer. “Double Take: Chinese Optics and their Media in Postglobal Perspective.” Ars Orientalis, vol. 48, (2018): 71–117.

Brown, Shana Julia. Pastimes: From Art and Antiquarianism to Modern Chinese Historiography.  Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011.

Pang, Laikwan. The Distorting Mirror: Visual Modernity in China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007.

Wang, Cheng-hua. “New Printing Technology and Heritage Preservation: Collotype Reproduction of Antiquities in Modern China, Circa 1908-1917.” In Joshua Fogel, edited. The Role of Japan in Modern Chinese Art, 273-308. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.