Daily Life for the Common People of China
ISBN: 9789004361027
Platform/Publisher: Knowledge Unlatched / Brill
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: unlimited; Download: unlimited

In this exciting book, Ronald Suleski introduces daily life for the common people of China in the century from 1850 to 1950. They were semi-literate, yet they have left us written accounts of their hopes, fears, and values. They have left us the hand-written manuscripts ( chaoben 抄本) now flooding the antiques markets in China. These documents represent a new and heretofore overlooked category of historical sources.
Suleski gives a detailed explanation of the interaction of chaoben with the lives of the people. He offers examples of why they were so important to the poor laboring masses: people wanted horoscopes predicting their future, information about the ghosts causing them headaches, a few written words to help them trade in the rural markets, and many more examples are given. The book contains a special appendix giving the first complete translation into English of a chaoben describing the ghosts and goblins that bedeviled the poor working classes.

Ronald Suleski (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is currently Professor of History at Suffolk University, Boston, and Director of the Rosenberg Institute for East Asian Studies there. Among his books are Civil Government in Warlord China: Tradition, Modernization, and Manchuria (Peter Lang Publishing, 2002); Manshu no seishonen zo $$$ [Images of Japanese Youth in Manchuria] (Aichi University, 2008); The Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University: A fifty-year history, 1955-2005 (Harvard Fairbank Center, 2005) and The modernization of Monchuria: An Annotated Bibliography (The Chinese University Press, 1994).

hidden image for function call