The marketing blurb for Amitav Acharya’s most recent book From Southeast Asia to Indo-Pacific begins, rather portentiously, “Southeast Asia was created by geopolitics, and it might die with it.” The book itself, thank goodness, is a considerably more measured (and clearly-written) overview of how Southeast Asia and ASEAN came to be more or less synonymous…
The noun “Partition” (with a capital “P”) has, in South Asia and perhaps globally, come to mean the 1947 split of India and Pakistan, a climactic event that still roils, if not poison, domestic and international politics.
That Before Colonization can be read in several ways is to its favour, but also makes it hard to review. It takes aim at the way international relations (referred to by the field’s formal initials IR) has tended to go about its business; it is also a refreshingly straightforward discussion of, as in the subtitle,…
The new exhibit at Hong Kong’s Palace Museum is somewhat undersold by its title: “Wonders of Imperial Carpets”. There are indeed carpets—marvelous and quite extraordinary carpets—but the lesson of the exhibition—that of the two-way artistic and cultural influence between China and Islamic world—is mostly carried in the other exhibits, the bronzes, pottery, books, drawings and…
The star in Opera Hong Kong’s new production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s singspiel “The Magic Flute” is the staging. That is not to take anything away from the singing: Mexican tenor Andrés Moreno Garcia as Tamino, Americans John Chest and Sofia Troncoso (Papageno and Pamina) all sang credibly. Local soprano Rachel Kwok was a sparky…
Macau, to its understandable chagrin, often seems an afterthought: to Hong Kong which overtook it, to Canton when it came to China trade, to Manila and the eponymous galleons when it came to being an entrepôt of global status, in the history of Western colonialism and imperialism in East Asia generally and today when it…
Of all the horrors of this benighted century, the genocide of the Yazidis at the hands of ISIS a decade ago stands out for its extreme brutality and inhumanity. At the time, few people outside the region were aware of the group’s existence; as non-Muslims (Yazidism has pre-Zoroastrian roots), Yazidis were specifically targeted. The world…
Yu Hua, one of China’s most-acclaimed contemporary novelists, leapt to prominence, in English as well as Chinese, some three decades ago with his novels To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, both of which were made into well-received films. Both novels, about ordinary people struggling with extraordinary hardships, were notable for their matter-of-fact, slice-of-life…
If you only read one book by the prolific and (now) venerable John Man, it should perhaps be this one, literally so for it “revises and condenses” several chapters in his other books Genghis Khan, The Terracotta Army, Barbarians at the Wall, The Great Wall and Xanadu. It is, as one might expect from Man,…
Few subjects have progressed as rapidly in recent years as the study of prehistory and ancient history. The ability to decode the human genome has upended everything. In retrospect, archaeologists and linguists got an amazing amount right; the advent of DNA analysis (backed up by huge amounts of computing power) provided a layer of scientific…
Once upon a time, “storytellers” (who predate writers by a great margin) were respected members of the communities they served: entertainers, yes, but also playing a crucial role in preserving memories and lore by retelling old stories and creating new ones. If the blood of this tradition doesn’t actually run in Subi Taba’s veins, she…
Ankara-born Chris Aslan spent seven years living in Khiva, an old Silk Road town in what is now Uzbekistan, where he founded a silk carpet workshop. Expelled in 2005 during a purge of foreign NGOs, he then spent three years in Khorog, a town on the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border. Told by the authorities that perhaps he’d…
Had the eminent physicist Ernest Rutherford actually once said that “all science is either physics or stamp collecting”, he might have botany in mind, a discipline the very basis of which is collecting and labelling plants according to strict taxonomies. In her (perhaps aptly entitled) new book, Unmaking Botany, Kathleen C Gutierrez sets about describing…
Japan is a favourite destination for tourists the world over, but one reason it appeals to Hong Kong tourists (for whom it is a particular favourite) is that Kanji allows them to more or less work things out despite not knowing Japanese at all. Zev Handel’s new book Chinese Characters Across Asia tells the story…
Quite a lot of archaeological water, to say nothing of history writing, has flowed under the bridge since Early Southeast Asia’s first edition in 2014.