Mark Edward Lewis

In 221 BC, the First Emperor of Qin unified the lands that would become the heart of a Chinese empire. Though forged by conquest, this vast domain depended for its political survival on a fundamental reshaping of Chinese culture. With this informative book, we are present at the creation of an ancient imperial order whose major features would endure for...

The Tang dynasty is often called China's "golden age," a period of commercial, religious, and cultural connections spanning from Korea and Japan to the Persian Gulf, and a time of unsurpassed literary creativity. China’s Cosmopolitan Empire by Mark Edward Lewis captures this dynamic era in which the empire reached its greatest geographical extent under Chinese rule. During this period, painting...

After the collapse of the Han dynasty in the third century CE, China divided along a north-south line. Mark Lewis traces the changes that both underlay and resulted from this split in a period that saw the geographic redefinition of China, more engagement with the outside world, significant changes to family life, developments in the literary and social arenas, and...