Search Results (14)

A unique episode in the transregional connections of Buddhism is illustrated through the figures of Ruan Ziyu (1079–1102) and Liang Cineng (1098–1116). Since at least the Song dynasty, Huineng (638–713), the Sixth Patriarch of Chan Buddhism, has been a revered figure in Guangdong province of China, resulting in the formation of numerous stories and legends. In the Sihui region, near the urban hub called Zhaoqing, Ruan and Liang emerged as notable disciples of Huineng, reputed to have had spiritual encounters with the Sixth Patriarch and attained Buddhahood. Known as the “Ruan Buddha” and the “Liang Buddha”, they were venerated by the Sihui people during times of droughts, turmoil, and health crisis. Over time, they became integral to Sihui identity and spread to Southeast and South Asia, particularly as people emigrated from the region in the late nineteenth century. This article examines the various stories about Ruan and Liang that circulated in Sihui and how the two buddhas have been venerated, without many links to Huineng or Buddhism, in Malaysia and India. It highlights the significance of local adaptations of Buddhist figures in transregional contexts. Full article

Human-headed birds, a recurrent yet understudied motif on Han dynasty pictorial stones, are examined in this study with a focus on their mythical representations. Placed within visualisation of the world of the Queen Mother of the West, a belief popular in the Han Dynasty, these figures are argued to depict the Blue Birds (Qingniao) of Han mythology. Moreover, a distinct variation in the Shandong region shows a human-headed bird offering Jiahe, an auspicious plant, symbolising immortality and well-being in tomb art. Through a chaîne opératoire analysis, the paper traces their creation as a composite form, integrating familiar Han bird imagery—particularly owls—with Greco-Roman Siren elements transmitted along the Silk Road. The regional clustering of such depictions in zones of early cross-cultural contact underscores the role of external influences in shaping Han visual traditions. This study highlights how mythological beings were adapted amid shifting religious ideas and transregional interactions in early imperial China. Full article

A Sanskrit manuscript of the Prajñāpāramitā or Perfection of Wisdom in eight thousand verses, now in the Cambridge University Library, Add.1643, is one of the most ambitiously designed South Asian manuscripts from the eleventh century, with the highest number of painted panels known among the dated manuscripts from medieval South Asia until 1400 CE. Thanks to the unique occurrence of a caption written next to each painted panel, it is possible to identify most images in this manuscript as representing those of famous pilgrimage sites or auspicious images of specific locales. The iconographic program transforms Add.1643 into a portable device containing famous pilgrimage sites of the Buddhist world known to the makers and users of the manuscript in eleventh-century Nepal. It is one compact colorful package of a book, which can be opened and experienced in its unfolding three-dimensional space, like a virtual or imagined pilgrimage. Building on the recent research focusing on early medieval Buddhist sites across Monsoon Asia and analyzing the representational potentials and ontological values of painting, this essay demonstrates how this early eleventh-century Nepalese manuscript (Add.1643) and its visual program document and remember the knowledge of maritime travels and the transregional and intraregional activities of people and ideas moving across Monsoon Asia. Despite being made in the Kathmandu Valley with a considerable physical distance from the actual sea routes, the sites remembered in the manuscript open a possibility to connect the dots of human movement beyond the known networks and routes of “world systems”. Full article

This article explores the maritime connections relating to Buddhism and diplomacy between polities in Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula, the Indian subcontinent, and China from the beginning of the 11th century up to the 12th century CE. It focuses on new epigraphic evidence from Muara Jambi in the form of two inscribed strips of copper mentioning the Cūḍāmaṇivarmavihāra, a monastery funded by the king of Śrīvijaya in Nagapattinam (South India), and the Bālādityavihāra, probably located in Nālandā (Northeastern India). These new findings are compared to archaeological and textual materials from elsewhere in the Buddhist world that cast light on the web of transregional connections between Nusantara, China, and India in the early centuries of the second millennium. Full article

This study explores the intersection between religious and medical bathing practices across Monsoon Asia, with particularly reference to āyurvedic and Buddhist traditions. While previous scholarship has emphasised the ritualistic and social dimensions of bathing in Brahmanical and Buddhist contexts, this article complements it with discussions of its medicinal and healing functions, as outlined in classical texts and displayed in material culture. The research highlights how bathing was considered essential for maintaining bodily balance—a concept analogous to humoral theory in Galenic medicine—across different climatic and environmental conditions, particularly during the monsoon season. The article further examines the transregional circulation and localisation of these practices, considering how diverse Asian cultures adapted Indic bathing traditions to their unique climatic and cultural contexts. Notably, the study addresses the complex interplay between religious doctrines, health and environmental factors, drawing connections between āyurvedic principles and Buddhist medical discourses. The findings suggest that while the notion of balance in bathing practices was widespread, its interpretation and implementation varied significantly across regions, reflecting local environmental and cultural influences. Through a comparative analysis of sources from South Asia, China and Southeast Asia, this article provides a nuanced understanding of how religio-medical bathing practices were shaped by and responded to the diverse climatic realities of Monsoon Asia. Full article

This article examines the artistic contributions of two members of the ‘artes’ group, active in Lviv (Lwów during the interwar period) from 1929 to 1935: Aleksander Krzywobłocki (1901–1979) and Margit Reich-Sielska (1900–1980). Situated within the ‘artes’ milieu, which emerged as the most cohesive community among phenomena with a surrealist profile in the history of Polish art, their creative endeavors have faded from the collective memory of subsequent generations of art historians and critics, both within and beyond Poland. With the aim of elucidating the distinctive characteristics of Krzywobłocki and Sielska’s artistic attitudes, deeply rooted in the cultural landscape of interwar Galicia, this study explores their work as both manifestations of the avant-garde milieu in Lviv and contributions to the transnational surrealist movement. This examination takes a relational approach, considering their artistic output within a framework of trans-local and trans-regional connections. Drawing upon the works of various surrealists active in different European centers, I juxtapose the artistic approaches of Krzywobłocki and Sielska with other practitioners of the movement to highlight both convergences and differences in their expressions. By situating their artistic profiles within the broader modalities of surrealism as a polycentric movement and within the unique cultural context of Lviv—a city marked by its multiethnic, multicultural, and multiconfessional character—I argue that their imaginings should be classified as idiosyncratic idioms of surrealism. This hybrid expression, which developed on the peripheries of European artistic hubs, is primarily distinguished by an ‘archetypal load of tension’—a continual quest for archetypal content that has been lost in the modern world. Full article

Water pollution exhibits distinct negative externalities, necessitating trans-regional collaborative governance among basin governments. However, few studies have examined the structural features of water pollution collaboration networks among local governments in China from a spatial analysis perspective. This study focuses on 27 central cities in the Yangtze River Delta, collecting 109 policy texts and evidence of cooperative actions on water pollution governance among these cities. By utilizing a combination of social network analysis and GIS spatial analysis, the research visualizes the results and delves into the overall structure and internal features of the network. The results indicate that the density of the water pollution cooperation network is 0.75, suggesting that a relatively stable and closely connected network for collaborative governance of water pollution has been formed. Furthermore, the water pollution cooperation in the Yangtze River Delta exhibits a typical “multi-center” network structure, with Shanghai–Suzhou, Nanjing, and Hangzhou as the core, forming three city clusters with tighter cooperation. Suzhou, Shanghai, and Jiaxing have the highest degree of centrality, which are 51, 46, and 44, respectively. The analysis of degree centrality reveals that cities with higher levels of economic development or those that serve as provincial capitals often play a leading role in the cooperation network. The study also observes that adjacent cities or local governments closer to the core cities are more likely to establish cooperative relationships; this phenomenon is not limited by provincial administrative boundaries. Full article

Cultural landscape security is important to national spatial and cultural security. However, compared with the many achievements in the study of ecological security, transregional cultural landscape security research lacks enough attention to match its importance. In the context of advocacy of ‘connecting practices’ between nature and culture in the field of international heritage conservation, this paper developed an approach for constructing transregional vernacular cultural landscape security patterns and identifying the key protected areas. A method is put forward based on the case of the Yangtze River Delta Demonstration Area, one of the fastest urbanizing regions in China, and included the following three steps: (1) analyze the core values of the transregional vernacular cultural landscape from a long-time series and multi-scale perspective; (2) integrate ecological security assessment and value security evaluation by combining qualitative with quantitative methods; (3) build a comprehensive vernacular cultural landscape security pattern to identify key protected areas and develop a zoning and grading conservation strategy toolkit. The results proved that our new method could effectively build a cross-regional network of integrated spatial and functional relationships between the historical cultural and natural landscape and have great significance in improving the level of transregional territorial spatial governance. Full article

This study investigates the ongoing transformation in galleries, auctions, and museums in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taipei, and Singapore, where new models for art transactions and exhibiting practices lead to unprecedented evolution in the global art market. While the pandemic hit the art market unprecedentedly, art organizations in Asia are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel as the digitalization of online auctions and virtual art-viewing technology has made up for the cancellation of art events. We are also seeing increased cross-regional and cross-national collaborations in marketing and exhibiting activities. Whether or not it is part of their active strategy, to keep up with the rapid market changes, galleries and auctions must now devote more resources to their digital platforms. Affluent art collectors in this region see art consumption not only as a socially conditioned, symbolic mechanism manifesting wealth and cultural capital but also as an attractive investment vehicle with an increased appetite for the financialization of artworks. What are the benefits and complications of the digitalization of online art transactions and art viewing? How do multi-sited auctions and exhibitions indicate the increased demand for collaboration between commercial art organizations and art institutions? Based on fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with actors in the art markets and secondary Chinese resources, this research generates insights into organizational behaviors in Asia’s art scene and how the art market players actively adapt and persevere via taking on new, entrepreneurial models of operation and speeding up trans-regional and trans-national connectivity with their Western counterparts. Full article

As an important hub in the maritime transportation system, ports are vulnerable to events such as terrorist attacks, security accidents and bad weather. The failure of port nodes to function effectively affects the connectivity and efficiency of the shipping network and impedes trade between countries. In view of this, in this paper, we constructed the Maritime Silk Road shipping network based on route data and used transmissibility and diversity to represent the resilience of the network and nodes. Then, we analyzed the variation characteristics of resilience using disruption simulation and identified 9 dominant nodes and 15 vulnerable nodes that could help to accurately determine the factors that affect the resilience of the MSR shipping network structure. The results show that the Maritime Silk Road shipping network structure is vulnerable, and the failure of ports to function has different effects on network transmissibility and diversity. In terms of node transmissibility and diversity, there are differences in the resistance of port nodes to interventions. In addition, the failure of dominant ports to function and the emergence of vulnerable ports are significant factors that weaken the resilience of the network structure. When dominant ports are interrupted, this greatly affects the resilience of the network structure. It is necessary to reduce the possibilities of the failure of dominant ports. Vulnerable ports are weaknesses in the resilience of the network structure, which weaken the ability of the network to function. The centrality of these ports should be strengthened, and their relation to regional and trans-regional links should be enriched. The research results provide a scientific basis for ensuring the structural resilience of the Maritime Silk Road shipping network. Full article

This paper takes a fresh look at the global spread of the Chinese–Taiwanese new religious movement Yiguandao (一貫道; the emic transcription is “I-Kuan Tao”) by directing attention to the concrete places where transnational connections and interactions actually transpire, i.e., temples, shrines, and other sites of worship. Emically known as “Buddha halls” (fotang 佛堂), these places range from large-scale temple complexes, to small niches of worship in people’s private residences. Yet, they all share the potential of becoming venues of transregional interactions through processes of migration, the circulation of personnel, and local outreach. I argued that we need to take the distinct character of these localities more seriously, in order to fully understand the global networks of Yiguandao groups. Through their specific embeddedness in both local affairs and transnational projects, these temples are not simply local chapters of the (mostly) Taiwanese headquarters, but instead they are “translocalities” or even “portals of globalization”—two concepts developed in migration and global studies to help understand the significance of place in the recent phase of so-called globalization. By exploring Yiguandao temples across the globe, this paper critically evaluated these approaches, and their usefulness for the study of global religions. Empirically, it drew on both print and online material, as well as ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the author in Taiwan, Vienna (Austria), California, South Africa, and Japan from 2016 to 2018. Full article

In recent years, with the rapid growth of science and innovation, plenty of constantly-updated scientific achievements containing innovative knowledge can be acquired and used to solve problems. However, most undergraduate students and non-researchers cannot use them efficiently. In traditional teacher-centric education, education for sustainability is often marginalized and the interdisciplinary demand is neglected. Additionally, it fails to provide education for learners to connect abstract knowledge with actual world problems. This paper presents the design of a scientific publication management model to integrate scientific metadata based on the knowledge graph and data analysis technologies. Based on this model, an interdisciplinary transregional multiple application platform could be realized for scientific resource retrieval and analysis, the purpose of which is to enhance scientific retrieval efficiency and reduce learning difficulty in the scientific domains and encourage non-researchers to utilize scientific resources in their study and work. Finally, to evaluate this model, the use of the case of an entrepreneurship scientific publication management prototype system was implemented. This work not only favors student’s learning for sustainability through analysis and knowledge management functions, but also promotes their awareness, comprehensive thinking, and the skills to deal with the issues of sustainability in their future work. Full article

Threading charged polymers through a nanopore, driven by electric fields E, is investigated by means of Langevin dynamics simulations. The mean translocation time 〈 τ 〉 is shown to follow a scaling law N^α, and the exponent α increases monotonically from 1.16 (4) to 1.40 (3) with E. The result is double-checked by the calculation of mean square displacement of translocation coordinate, which asserts a scaling behavior t^β (for t near τ) with β complying with the relation αβ = 2. At a fixed chain length N, 〈τ〉 displayed a reciprocal scaling behavior E⁻¹ in the weak and also in the strong fields, connected by a transition E^−1.64(5) in the intermediate fields. The variations of the radius of gyration of chain and the positions of chain end are monitored during a translocation process; far-from-equilibrium behaviors are observed when the driving field is strong. A strong field can strip off the condensed ions on the chain when it passes the pore. The total charges of condensed ions are hence decreased. The studies for the probability and density distributions reveal that the monomers in the trans-region are gathered near the wall and form a pancake-like density profile with a hump cloud over it in the strong fields, due to fast translocation. Full article

The bulk hydropower transmission via trans-provincial and trans-regional power networks in China provides great operational flexibility to dispatch power resources between multiple power grids. This is very beneficial to alleviate the tremendous peak load pressure of most provincial power grids. This study places the focus on peak operations of cascaded hydropower plants serving multiple provinces under a regional connected AC/DC network. The objective is to respond to peak loads of multiple provincial power grids simultaneously. A two-stage search method is developed for this problem. In the first stage, a load reconstruction strategy is proposed to combine multiple load curves of power grids into a total load curve. The purpose is to deal with different load features in load magnitudes, peaks and valleys. A mutative-scale optimization method is then used to determine the generation schedules of hydropower plants. In the second stage, an exterior point search method is established to allocate the generation among multiple receiving power grids. This method produces an initial solution using the load shedding algorithm, and further improves it by iteratively coordinating the generation among different power grids. The proposed method was implemented to the operations of cascaded hydropower plants on Xin-Fu River and another on Hongshui River. The optimization results in two cases satisfied the peak demands of receiving provincial power grids. Moreover, the maximum load difference between peak and valley decreased 12.67% and 11.32% in Shanghai Power Grid (SHPG) and Zhejiang Power Grid (ZJPG), exceeding by 4.85% and 6.72% those of the current operational method, respectively. The advantage of the proposed method in alleviating peak-shaving pressure is demonstrated. Full article