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…
At first glance, Minyoung Kang’s new book, Plant Lady, might be mistaken for yet another addition to the Korean comfort fiction genre. After all, Shanna Tan has translated Korean novels set in bookshops, laundromats, and photo studios, to name but a few. On the cover of the US edition of Plant Lady, a young woman…
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…
Inter-War Paris was a mecca for artists from around the world, including East Asia and, in particular, the then French colony of Indochina. Thao Thai’s new novel, The Seekers of Deer Creek, centers around a fictional Vietnamese painter and a portrait he created decades ago. The story is part mystery, part family drama, but it’s…
At just 45 square kilometers, Orchid (Lanyu) Island might be tiny but it is a completely different world from nearby Taiwan, to which it belongs and of which it lies east in the Pacific. The island is populated by the indigenous Tao, who live a lifestyle that is tied to the sea. In Eyes of…
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…
“Do not overlook any anomalies… If you find an anomaly, turn back immediately… If you do not find any anomalies, do not turn back… Go out through Exit 8”. Guided only by these cryptic instructions, the unnamed narrator of Genki Kawamura’s Exit 8 attempts to break free from an underground loop. Wandering through the same…
Joost Hiltermann’s new novel is a powerful exploration of the 1988 Anfal genocide, launched against the Iraqi Kurds by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime. It may have resulted in up to 100,000 civilian murders during what was officially a rural counter-insurgency campaign. The novel deals with both the devastating impact the Anfal had at the time…
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…
The poetic tradition of China has historically found a warm welcome in Japan, and both cultures draw on a common well of poets, religious currents, and sacred texts. It is thus fitting that two new volumes by essential poets from each country should be published nearly side by side by New Directions. The first, Cold…