There is an irresistible temptation to read filmmaker Adachi Masao’s life as if it were itself a movie. A Japanese New Wave filmmaker disappears into Lebanon, becomes associated with the Japanese Red Army, spends decades in exile, is imprisoned, and eventually returns home as one of the most controversial figures in postwar Japanese culture. It…
Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin know each other well. Since 2013, when Xi completed his ascent to the top of the People’s Republic of China, they have met more than 40 times. Perhaps no other two heads of state currently in office have conferred as often. This, the pair maintains, has fostered an unusually close…
The battle lines around Emperor Aurangzeb’s posthumous reputations are clearly drawn. On one side, the monumental five-volume history by Jadunath Sarkar over a century ago defined the last great Mughal as a bigot, a fanatic, a bloodthirsty tyrant, and the gravedigger of the empire. Moreover, some claim that the brother whom Aurangzeb defeated and executed…
For most readers and filmgoers, the emotional architecture of the final Qing court was built not by historians but by Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1987 visually intoxicating film The Last Emperor. It fixed certain ideas about the enigmatic emperor Puyi in the public imagination: a spectral figure wandering through a museum of vanished power, emotionally stunted, politically…
Both the subtitle of historian Michael Dillon’s new book Shanghai: The Story of China’s Most Dynamic City and its jaunty pink and yellow cover, punctuated with stylised drawings of the city’s landmarks, suggest this might be a fairly breezy version of the Shanghai story. Certainly, the city seems to encourage such accounts, which often foreground…
When Ivan the Terrible received the English ambassador Jerome Edward Horsey in 1580, he showed him the Kremlin’s treasury room, full of gifts and tribute from sultans, beys and khans: scimitars, saddles, bridles and quivers, all covered in jewels and nielloed steel. Horsey could imagine he had been transported to Cathay, Tabriz, or Lahore. Viewing…
When Japan was first opened to widespread Western contact in the late 19th century, visitors saw it as a glimpse into the past. In its arts and crafts, they perceived an unconscious artistic genius lost to those who lived in industrial societies. At some point in the late 20th century, travellers started to see not…
In 1819, Singapore came under the control of the English East India Company, under murky circumstances involving its rivalrous local officials acting without authority from London, exploiting divisions amongst the existing royal family, and ignoring claims that the island fell within the Dutch sphere of influence. Whichever version of history one believes, it is clear…
Classical Persian literature offers very few autobiographies. We tend to admire the works of great poets in that tradition, in this case Amir Khusraw, without knowing much about them as individuals. If Khusraw’s poems are like flowers, “Exquisite Things and Strange Wonders” shows the gardens where the flowers grew. Alyssa Gabbay’s fluid translation brings to…
Long hidden in private papers is the account of the revolver shots that rang out in Stone Town on an October night in 1886, but the man who died was quickly forgotten. Dismissed by the Portuguese consular court as merely “an unnamed African man”, the victim’s erasure captures exactly the system of moral compromise that…
Historians writing of Japanese Americans (also known as Nisei) in the Second World War have produced more books on their fighting in Europe as soldiers of the US Army’s 442nd Regimental Combat Team (RCT) than they have on how the Nisei gathered intelligence and produced propaganda for US civilian agencies and the Army in the…
The first book I ever read about India was Romila Thapar’s 1965 History of India, published by Penguin. That little book dazzled with its sprawling scope and storytelling magic, but one also felt the presence of the author’s critical mind tackling perennial questions: what is history; how do we understand it; what is the purpose…
Breakfast, the first meal of the day, in India carries two competing traditions. On one hand, ritual references to food offered to the gods each morning suggest the meal has always held a place of its own. On the other hand, for the labouring classes, breakfast was rarely more than the previous night’s leftovers, hurriedly…
Among the earliest examples of sculptural art are representations of the human figure, like the 25,000-year-old Willendorf Venus discovered in Austria in 1908. In western art, fascination with portraiture and anatomical realism were features of the earliest sculptures around the Mediterranean, from Nefertiti and King Tut to Roman emperors and Greek gods. This important volume—the…
Many books about ancient Chinese history are written for those already in the know; there is a dearth of accessible narratives for the general reader. Happily, Andrew Meyer’s new book fills this gap. He skilfully recounts the Warring States Period (ca 470-221 BC), a chaotic era that followed the “slow moving crisis” of the Springs-and-Autumns…