Yuan

Over 100,000 copies sold! Coming Out, Then Coming Home Christopher Yuan, the son of Chinese immigrants, discovered at an early age that he was different. He was attracted to other boys. As he grew into adulthood, his mother, Angela, hoped to control the situation. Instead, she found that her son and her life were spiraling out of control—and her own personal demons were determined to defeat her. Years of heartbreak, confusion, and prayer followed before the Yuans found a place of complete surrender, which is God’s desire for all families. Their amazing story, told from the perspectives of both mother and son, offers hope for anyone affected by homosexuality. God calls all who are lost to come home to him. Casting a compelling vision for holy sexuality, Out of a Far Country speaks to prodigals, parents of prodigals, and those wanting to minister to the gay community. “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.” - Luke 15:20 Includes a discussion guide for personal reflection and group use.

Statesman or warlord? Yuan Shikai (1859–1916) has been both hailed as China’s George Washington for his role in the country’s transition from empire to republic and condemned as a counter-revolutionary. In any list of significant modern Chinese figures, he stands in the first rank. Yet Yuan Shikai: A Reappraisal sheds new light on the controversial history of this talented administrator, fearsome general, and enthusiastic modernizer. Due to his death during the civil war his actions provoked, much Chinese historiography portrays Yuan as a traitor, a usurper, and a villain. After toppling the last emperor of China, Yuan endeavoured to build dictatorial power and establish his own dynasty while serving as the first president of the new republic, eventually going so far as to declare himself emperor. Drawing on previously untapped primary sources and recent scholarship, Patrick Fuliang Shan offers a lucid, comprehensive, and critical new interpretation of Yuan’s part in shaping modern China.

From the author of Out of a Far Country, which details his dramatic conversion from an agnostic gay man who put his identity in his sexuality to a Bible professor who now puts his identity in Christ alone, comes a gospel-centered discussion of sex, desire, and relationships. Dr. Christopher Yuan explores the concept of holy sexuality--chastity in singleness or faithfulness in marriage--in a practical and relevant manner, equipping readers with an accessible yet robust theology of sexuality. Whether you want to share Christ with a loved one who identifies as gay or you're wrestling with questions of identity yourself, this book will help you better understand sexuality in light of God's grand story and realize that holy sexuality is actually good news for all.

This anthology features translations of ten seminal plays written during the Yuan dynasty (1279Ð1368), a period considered the golden age of Chinese theater. By turns lyrical and earthy, sentimental and ironic, Yuan drama spans a broad emotional, linguistic, and stylistic range. Combining sung arias with declaimed verses and doggerels, dialogues and mime, and jokes and acrobatic feats, Yuan drama formed a vital part of ChinaÕs culture of performance and entertainment in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. To date, few Yuan-dynasty plays have been translated into English. Well-known translators and scholars have supervised the making of this collection and add a short description to each play. A general introduction situates all selections within their cultural and historical contexts.

Noted for its magnificent architecture and extraordinary history, the Yuanming Yuan is China's most famous imperial garden. The complex was begun in the early eighteenth century, and construction continued over the next 150 years. While Chinese historians, and many Chinese in general, view the garden as the paramount achievement of Chinese architecture and landscape design, almost nothing is known about the Yuanming Yuan in the West. A Paradise Lost is the first comprehensive study of the palatial garden complex in a Western language. Written in a broad and engaging style, Young-tsu Wong brings "the garden of perfect brightness" to life as he leads readers on a grand tour of its architecture and history. Wong begins by inspecting the garden's physical appearance and its architectural elements. He discusses the origin and evolution of these structures and the aesthetics of their design and arrangement. Throughout he refers to maps and original models of individual buildings and other existing gardens of the Ming-Qing period, including the well-preserved Yihe Yuan and the Chengde Summer Mountain Retreat in Rehe. A special feature of the book is its exploration of the activities and daily life of the royal household.

A monumental illustrated survey of the architecture of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century China The Yuan dynasty endured for a century, leaving behind an architectural legacy without equal, from palaces, temples, and pagodas to pavilions, tombs, and stages. With a history enlivened by the likes of Khubilai Khan and Marco Polo, this spectacular empire spanned the breadth of China and far, far beyond, but its rulers were Mongols. Yuan presents the first comprehensive study in English of the architecture of China under Mongol rule. In this richly illustrated book, Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt looks at cities such as the legendary Shangdu—inspiration for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Xanadu—as well as the architecture the Mongols encountered on their routes of conquest. She examines the buildings and monuments of diverse faiths in China during the period, from Buddhist and Daoist to Confucian, Islamic, and Christian, as well as unusual structures such as observatories, archways, stone and metal buildings, and sarcophaguses. Steinhardt dispels long-standing views of the Mongols as destroyers of cities and architecture across Asia, showing how the khans and their families built more than they tore down. She demonstrates that the stipulations of the Chinese building system were powerful and resilient enough to guide the architecture that rose under Mongolian rule. Drawing on Steinhardt’s groundbreaking textual research in numerous languages as well as her pioneering fieldwork at sites across East Asia, Yuan will become the standard reference on this critical period of cultural and artistic exchange.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Sept. 28, 2010-Jan. 2, 2011.

"Ma Yuan emerges as an artist who captures the reality of season, time, and mood in a dazzlingly abbreviated style that is nonetheless utterly convincing in its rendering of the natural world.---Maxwell K. Hearn Metropolitan Museum of Art ichard Edwards and Ma Yuan have something in common: both are deeply committed to the work of art and the medium of ink painting. And like Ma Yuan's brushwork, Edwards's prose couples formal restraint with expressive power. This book is a major contribution to the literature on the art of ink painting at the Southern Song court.---Robert Sharf University of California, Berkeley Ma Yuan, one of China's best-known artists, was a key figure in the period widely celebrated as the golden era of Chinese landscape painting. The Heart of Ma Yuan offers a careful discussion of Ma Yuan's painting as it emerged within the sophisticated artistic environment of Hangzhou in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Beautifully illustrated with more than 300 illustrations from leading museums and private collections around the world, the book includes discussions of Ma Yuan's family of six generations of skillful painters, his many patrons, and his distinctive style in engaging Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist genres and his superb landscapes, including animals, flowers, and detailed studies of water. Widely noted for his own keen eye and masterful stylistic analysis, Richard Edwards cultivates the art of looking for a broad readership, from general art lovers to specialists in art history. As a Western scholar exploring the significance of a highly refined Eastern culture, he draws on natural history, poetry, and relevant contemporary writing as well as the work of other artists.

This book documents the extraordinarily significant transfers and cultural diffusion between the Mongol Yuan Dynasty of China and Central and West Asia, which had a broad impact on Eurasian history in the 13th and 14th centuries. The Yuan era witnessed perhaps the greatest inter-civilisational contacts in world history and has thus begun to attract the attention of both scholars and the general public. This volume offers tangible evidence of the Western and Central Asian influences, via the Mongols, on Chinese, and to a certain extent Korean, medicine, astronomy, navigation, and even foreign relations. Turkic peoples and other Muslims played particularly vital roles in such transmissions. These inter-civilisational relations led to the first precise Western knowledge of East and South Asia and stimulated Europeans to discover new routes to the East. The authors of these essays, specialists in their respective fields, shine a light on these vital exchanges, which anyone interested in the origins of global history will find fascinating. “In this volume of wide-ranging essays, scholars from the United States, China and Europe present new insights into how the close relationship between Mongol China and Ilkhanid Persia, and the Mongol employment of Eurasians (many Muslims) of diverse origins, shaped Yuan politics, foreign trade, and culture (scientific knowledge, architecture, medicine), as well as the life of East Asia in the 13th to 14th centuries and beyond. Not surprisingly, in addressing the nature of cultural influence, and how it should or can be identified, measured, and assessed, these authors do not reach a consensus, but do shed light on issues of agency - Mongol, Chinese, and other - and in so doing offer up a wealth of fascinating detail about an era of broad interest to comparative historians of the premodern world as well as specialists on China.” - Ruth W. Dunnell, James P. Storer Professor of Asian History, Kenyon College “A central aim of this volume is to stimulate scholarly interest in the Yuan Dynasty, the ‘step-sister in the study of China.’ By providing a fascinating array of articles - ranging from Muslim maritime semi-colonialism to Chinese resistance of Islamic architectural and astronomical innovation, juxtaposed with medical and cartographical exchanges from West to East, as well as the political influence of Qip?aq Turks in Beijing and neo-Confucian Uyghurs in Chos?n Korea - it has thereby succeeded admirably.” - Johan Elverskog, Altshuler University Distinguished Professor, Southern Methodist University

Born Red is an artistically wrought personal account, written very much from inside the experience, of the years 1966-1969, when the author was a young teenager at middle school. It was in the middle schools that much of the fury of the Cultural Revolution and Red Guard movement was spent, and Gao was caught up in very dramatic events, which he recounts as he understood them at the time. Gao's father was a county political official who was in and out of trouble during those years, and the intense interplay between father and son and the differing perceptions and impact of the Cultural Revolution for the two generations provide both an unusual perspective and some extraordinary moving moments. He also makes deft use of traditional mythology and proverbial wisdom to link, sometimes ironically, past and present. Gao relates in vivid fashion how students-turned-Red Guards held mass rallies against 'capitalist roader' teachers and administrators, marching them through the streets to the accompaniment of chants and jeers and driving some of them to suicide. Eventually the students divided into two factions, and school and town became armed camps. Gao tells of the exhilaration that he and his comrades experienced at their initial victories, of their deepening disillusionment as they utter defeat as the tumultuous first phase of the Cultural Revolution came to a close. The portraits of the persons to whom Gao introduces us - classmates, teachers, family members - gain weight and density as the story unfolds, so that in the end we see how they all became victims of the dynamics of a mass movement out of control.