Fountain of FortuneFountain of Fortune
Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000-1700
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eBook, 1996
Current format, eBook, 1996, , No Longer Available.eBook, 1996
Current format, eBook, 1996, , No Longer Available. Offered in 0 more formatsThe most striking feature of Wutong, the preeminent God of Wealth in late imperial China, was the deity’s diabolical character. Wutong was perceived not as a heroic figure or paragon but rather as an embodiment of greed and lust, a maleficent demon who preyed on the weak and vulnerable. In The Sinister Way, Richard von Glahn examines the emergence and evolution of the Wutong cult within the larger framework of the historical development of Chinese popular or vernacular religionas opposed to institutional religions such as Buddhism or Daoism. Von Glahn’s study, spanning three millennia, gives due recognition to the morally ambivalent and demonic aspects of divine power within the common Chinese religious culture.
Surveying Chinese religion from 1000 BCE to the beginning of the twentieth century,The Sinister Way views the Wutong cult as by no means an aberration. In Von Glahn’s work we see how, from earliest times, the Chinese imagined an enchanted world populated by fiendish fairies and goblins, ancient stones and trees that spring suddenly to life, ghosts of the unshriven dead, and the blood-eating spirits of the mountains and forests. From earliest times, too, we find in Chinese religious culture an abiding tension between two fundamental orientations: on one hand, belief in the power of sacrifice and exorcism to win blessings and avert calamity through direct appeal to a multitude of gods; on the other, faith in an all-encompassing moral equilibrium inhering in the cosmos.
In this study, the first of its kind in English, Richard von Glahn offers a definitive analysis of the economic, political, and social history of money and monetary policy during the Song, Yuan, Ming, and early Qing dynasties. Von Glahn departs from previously held ideas about the effects of money and international trade in bullion on the rise and decline of dynastic power in China. His study also links Chinese monetary history to changing trends in money-use and trade in gold and silver in Asia, Europe, and the Western Hemisphere. He argues that China's shift to a silver economy had a decisive influence not only on the growth of a market economy in China but also on the formation of a global economy in the early modern era.
Exhaustively researched from archival sources, Fountain of Fortune examines critically the many facets of China's domestic and foreign monetary policy, including the foundations of Chinese monetary theory.
Surveying Chinese religion from 1000 BCE to the beginning of the twentieth century,The Sinister Way views the Wutong cult as by no means an aberration. In Von Glahn’s work we see how, from earliest times, the Chinese imagined an enchanted world populated by fiendish fairies and goblins, ancient stones and trees that spring suddenly to life, ghosts of the unshriven dead, and the blood-eating spirits of the mountains and forests. From earliest times, too, we find in Chinese religious culture an abiding tension between two fundamental orientations: on one hand, belief in the power of sacrifice and exorcism to win blessings and avert calamity through direct appeal to a multitude of gods; on the other, faith in an all-encompassing moral equilibrium inhering in the cosmos.
In this study, the first of its kind in English, Richard von Glahn offers a definitive analysis of the economic, political, and social history of money and monetary policy during the Song, Yuan, Ming, and early Qing dynasties. Von Glahn departs from previously held ideas about the effects of money and international trade in bullion on the rise and decline of dynastic power in China. His study also links Chinese monetary history to changing trends in money-use and trade in gold and silver in Asia, Europe, and the Western Hemisphere. He argues that China's shift to a silver economy had a decisive influence not only on the growth of a market economy in China but also on the formation of a global economy in the early modern era.
Exhaustively researched from archival sources, Fountain of Fortune examines critically the many facets of China's domestic and foreign monetary policy, including the foundations of Chinese monetary theory.
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- Berkeley, Calif. : University of California Press, c1996.
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