The life of Puyi, the last emperor of China, often feels like a spectacle—in no small part due to the 1987 Oscar-winning film The Last Emperor. Yet the true story being Puyi, as well as his wife, the empress Wanrong, is more complicated. Two foreigners were asked to tutor both Puyi and Wanrong: Reginald Johnston and…
Today, we’re welcoming novelist Tom Lin back to the show, whose new novel Babylon, South Dakota (Little, Brown, June 2026) moves his fascination with the American West into stranger and more uncanny territory. A Chinese family moves to a new farm in South Dakota; after the government takes an interest in a plot near their home for…
What’s going on in the Chinese economy? China reported GDP growth of just 4.3% last quarter. Consumption is sluggish, exports are booming, electronics manufacturers and chipmakers are reporting huge profits as car sales slump. Joe Ngai and Nick Leung dive into the Chinese economy in their latest book The Next China Is Still China: An Insider’s…
Many of us have watched the classic 1962 movie Lawrence of Arabia, the somewhat fictionalised work based on the life of T. E. Lawrence during the Arab Revolt and the First World War. But Lawrence was part of the Arab Bureau, an effort to better understand and influence the region as Britain fought the Ottoman…
On June 10, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York returned two pieces of artwork to Cambodia: an Angkor statue and a sandstone lintel. It’s the latest repatriation effort by the U.S.’s premier art museum, and the third time the Met has had to give up Cambodian artifacts specifically. Matthew Campbell’s The Man Who Stole…
Most people only know one of the Ryukyu Islands: the island of Okinawa, home to sandy beaches and one of the United States’ most important bases in Asia. There are lots of myths about this island chain, which stretch from southern Japan down to the island of Taiwan: That it owed loyalty to China, given…
Turkmenistan rarely makes international headlines–and when it did, it was often stories that highlighted things like the strange cult of personality that surrounded Saparmurat Niyazov, its first post-Soviet president, who named months after himself and made his memoir required reading. Olivier Hein joins us on the show today to talk about Turkmenistan’s long history: as…
In 2012, China debuted its first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, a refurbished Soviet-era ship from Ukraine. The debut of the Liaoning was largely thanks to a longtime pressure campaign by Liu Huaqing, the onetime leader of the People’s Liberation Army Navy and the man responsible for transforming China’s naval strategy. (China now has three carriers,…
The story of the Moy family—U.S.-born Chinese-American siblings who grow up in the first half of the 20th century—is one that spans the Pacific, covering New York, Chicago, and cosmopolitan Shanghai. It’s a story that spans the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Chinese Civil War, and the early Cold War—and stars one sibling…
In 1971, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi threw a party to celebrate the 2,500-year anniversary of the Persian Empire. It was planned to be a massive party, with tents set up in the desert, and invitations sent to just about every world leader across both the Western and Soviet blocs. Robert Templer writes about this celebration–and…
Iran is, once again, in global headlines, following U.S. strikes on the country earlier this year. Operation Epic Fury, as the Department of Defense called it, is the latest twist in Iran’s modern history, starting from the coup that brought the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power, through the 1956 coup against Mossadegh and the…
Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, is known for his outfits. Since rising to become India’s head of government in 2014, photographers and journalists have long followed his clothing styles, each saying something about India. It’s part of a long tradition of using clothing to make a statement about India—and about defining a political brand. Nor…
In October 1943, the Gripsholm—a Swedish ocean liner—and the Teia Maru—a Japanese troop ship—sat in Mormugao, a port in Portuguese India. There, the two ships exchanged their passengers: Allied civilians stuck in Japanese territory after Pearl Harbor , and an assortment of Japanese, Japanese-American, and other Japanese-ethnic people from the Americas. The trade capped a…
North Korea has survived wars, sanctions, and isolation—to the point where it now seems that the continuation of the Kim dynasty, and a starkly divided Korea, is assured. But history is filled with events where some change might have drastically altered how a country’s development might have gone. North Korea is no different, at least…
The British Empire covered much of the world during the 19th century–and each time someone moved through it, they left a paper trail in their wake. Julia Stephens, the author of Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire (Princeton University Press, 2025), uses that archive of documents to try to piece together the…