“A fascinating different vision of the complex Asian country is what we discover in the deep and highly documented investigation of Albert Galvany” (ABC Cultural)

This book offers an alternative vision of ancient China, a crucial and particularly fruitful period in the field of reflection, grounded in the study of the various ways in which three emblematic effigies are declined - sages, deviants and autocrats - who, due to their extraordinary properties or skills are outside the norm and the common.
Far from penetrating this exuberant intellectual landscape from its seminal nucleus, conventionally occupied by Confucian ideology —paradigm of measure, balance and harmony—, the aim here is to explore its most indomitable cartography as it is expressed in a multitude of rarely used documents: divinatory manuals, legal codes, cosmological breviaries, military manuscripts, liturgical compilations or philosophical treatises.
The rigorous analysis of these materials, many of them unpublished, leads the reader to the disturbing and revealing presence of beings stigmatized for exhibiting a tortured body as a result of a criminal conviction; of characters whose bizarre behavior undermines the circumspect and sacrosanct character of funeral rites; of individuals capable of predicting the outcome of an event in its most incipient strata; experts in persuasion who threaten to conquer entire countries using their sharp tongues; or of fearsome rulers who yearn to impose an absolute order by adopting the phantasmagorical features of the spirits and the inhuman principles that govern the cosmos.

- Video in which Albert Galvany presents Figures of the Exception in Ancient China

- Interview with Albert Galvany on RNE's Asia Hoy program.

- Interview with Albert Glavany in The Flight of the Owl.