xviii PREFACE TO VOLUME 6
ti-t'u hsiieh she, 1974—6; Peking: Ti-t'u ch'u-pan she, 1980—1), vol. 6,
covering Sung, Liao, Hsi-Hsia, and Chin, and vol. 7, covering the Yuan
period. Maps 23 and 37 are adapted from the
Bulletin
of
the Museum
of
Far
Eastern
Antiquities,
59 (1987), pp. 214, 215.
The Chinese official titles generally follow Charles
O.
Hucker's A
Dictionary
of
Official Titles
in
Imperial China
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985).
However, for our period, this work is incomplete in some respects. The usage
of titles under all the regimes covered in this volume
was
constantly changing,
and the reader should remember that the same office title
was
often used by the
Sung, Liao, Hsia, Chin, and Yuan with somewhat different connotations,
sometimes necessitating differing English translations.
Emperors
are
referred to
by
their temple
names
during their reign and
by
their
personal names before their succession to the throne. Lists of emperors, giving
the various regnal titles used during their reigns, are provided in Tables 1-4.
Dates normally follow the Chinese form rather than the Western calendar.
The reader should be aware that the Chinese year is normally converted to a
corresponding Western year but that these do not correspond exactly. Thus,
for example, the Treaty of Shan-yuan was concluded in the Chinese year
equivalent to 1004, though this was actually 24 January 1005.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editors of this volume
have
faced great problems arising from the complex-
ity of the period and its sources, and the variety of languages and cultures that
impinge on its story. We wish to express out gratitude to all those members of
the international scholarly community whose advice we have requested on
points of detail and to thank them for their careful responses. In particular, we
wish to acknowledge the assistance of Professor Frederick W. Mote, who read
and commented in detail on all the contributions to this volume, and the
editorial work of
Dr.
James Geiss, who devoted a decade of meticulous schol-
arly attention to this and other volumes of
The Cambridge History
of
China.
We
also wish to thank Professor Elizabeth Endicott-West, who not only contrib-
uted her own chapter to this volume but also assisted the editors in ensuring
that the usage of Mongolian, Turkic, Tibetan, and Persian terms is uniform
throughout, and Mrs. Soo-won Kim, who advised us on Korean problems.
Preparing this volume took several years, and our work was made possible
by the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and
by Princeton University.
DCT
HF
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