Approaching the Buddha: Transmission and Transformation, is based on the Xuzhou Collection, a dazzling array of ceremonial objects assembled by an anonymous collector and housed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. For students of the dharma, these images are alive, living transmissions rather than decorative relics. That collector, whose identity is withheld throughout,…
Walking through Siberia in the dead of winter may not, on the face of it, sound like a very good idea, yet that is what Charlie Walker intended to do in February 2022. Yakutsk is built on the banks of the Lena River and I would ski-trek northwards along the water’s frozen surface for 1,000…
A New York Times headline from late February read “Cambodia Celebrates the Return of Looted Artifacts From a Tainted Dealer”. It wasn’t front-page news, and readers may have missed the connection to previous scandals involving such storied institutions as New York’s Metropolitan Museum, the Smithsonian, the Denver Art Museum, Sotheby’s and Spinks, all of whom…
That the US is “imperialistic”, if not necessarily “imperial”, has been a point of political rhetoric my entire life. That, however, the US constitutes and maintains an actual empire is an idea of somewhat more recent vintage; whether or not Daniel Immerwahr was the first to make the point in How to Hide an Empire:…
Chen Munian is not a murderer. Yet who is he accused of murdering? Why can he not shake off the accusation? These questions, otherwise central in a book initially presented as a murder mystery, unravel in Xu Zechen’s Night Train. The novel begins with Munian working as a gardener at a unaccredited institute of higher…
A young, aspiring actor joins an itinerant theatre troupe to perform on makeshift stages in remote villages, traveling from place to place by truck, or in the absence of paved roads, by bullock cart. Readers will recall scenes from The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha by Satrajit Ray, or Shakespearewallah, by James Ivory. There is…
Histories of the Korean War (1950-1953) published in the United States have been surprisingly numerous for a conflict known as America’s “forgotten war”, but few books have appeared in English on the division and occupation of Korea by the Soviet Union and the United States (1945-48). Fewer still have focused on what happened in Korea…
Cultural Mavericks traces the rise of independent bookselling in China over the last twenty years. That such a rise should merit a two-hundred-page academic study is, at first glance, counter-intuitive; this, after all, has been an era in which online bookstores and other digital reading solutions have, in the west, made independent bookselling seem an…
“The Persian learned men,” wrote Herodotus in his Histories, “say that the Phoenicians were the cause of the feud.” Historians have been trying ever since to understand the series of wars that set Europe and Asia against each other, going back to the Trojan War. In The Race for Universal Monarchy, Ebru Turan argues that,…
Shefalee Vasudev’s Stories We Wear unpacks the contradictions behind image and appearance in the vast and diverse land that is India. Vasudev’s approach to her subject is encapsulated in a chapter about the homespun fabric once championed by Mahatma Gandhi which she titles “How Khadi Became Uncool”. She interviews several hands-on designer-entrepreneurs who are deeply committed…
In one sense the title of Xiaobing Li’s biography of Chinese Admiral Liu Huaqing, China’s Mahan, is somewhat misleading because the author concludes that Admiral Liu has more in common with the onetime commander of the Soviet Navy Sergey Gorshkov than with the American naval historian and strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan. Admiral Liu himself stated…
In one of the cases of history not so much repeating itself as rhyming, the current trend of Chinese Americans moving to China, either for opportunity or to avoid perceived threats, is hardly a new phenomenon. Historian Charlotte Brooks tells such a story from a century ago in her new book, The Moys of New…
Vinu P is a “corpse collector”; that is, he retrieves the bodies of those who die “unnatural” deaths—victims of accidents, suicides, and abandonment, and so on—and assists the police in the enquiries that follow. This being India, where Vinu lives and works in Kerala, what might elsewhere be considered the duties of a first responder…
At the turn of the 17th century, Florentine Francesco Carletti left from Seville with his father Antonio for Cape Verde, where they were planning to buy slaves for resale in the Caribbean. He ended up in an almost decade-long circumnavigation of the world, the first private citizen to do so. His travels took him to…
Much of the contemporary Indian literary landscape features writing in English and Indian languages, but Sheela Mahadevan points to the less-studied Francophone writing in India in Writing Between Languages: Translation and Multilingualism in Indian Francophone Writing. An academic at the University Liverpool and the English language translator of Ari Gautier’s Indian-Francophone novel Carnet secret de…