In 1955, Professor John King Fairbank established the Center for Asian Research at Harvard not to train scholars per se, but to educate and prepare a new generation of public servants for engagement with Chairman Mao’s China. Sinology was already an established academic discipline in Europe and the United States, tracing a lineage from the Jesuit missionaries through to the great 19th century translators such as James Legge, Thomas Wade and Herbert Giles. But unlike the Sinologists, who approached Chinese civilization through its ancient texts, the China Hands that Fairbank would train at Harvard were multidisciplinary men—in those days, it was primarily men—of the world: aspiring journalists, diplomats and policymakers.
Hong Kong had full year of opera performances, from grand opera to chamber opera and recital, in Italian, French, English and even Chinese, augmented by excellent performances in Macau and Shenzhen.
Deftly illustrating the use of more than 1,500 commonly used Japanese words and phrases, author Timothy Stout gives learners a clear, easy-to-use introduction to this fascinating language.
This collection of short stories presents the grim reality of war-torn Manchuria in the 1930s. Despite the extreme poverty and brutality depicted, such is the skill of author Kang Kyeong-ae that her oppressed characters achieve a kind of nobility, at least in art if not in life.
What if Michelangelo had not, as history concurs he had, declined the Sultan’s invitation to come to Constantinople in 1506 to design a bridge over the Golden Horn? This is the conceit behind Mathias Énard’s new novel, or rather novella, Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants (a perhaps anachronistic borrowing from the preface of a collection of Rudyard Kipling stories). What if Michelangelo had instead accepted?
What do you do when you’re given a magic sword and a “dragon horse”? You sally out into the wicked world, of course, rescue maidens in distress, overthrow evil kings and chop off a great deal of heads while shouting over and over again variations of “Stretch out your neck and receive my sword!” However, as you fight manfully to restore your Crown Prince to his throne, which has been usurped by a wicked, scheming Prime Minister, you demonstrate at the same time the supreme Confucian virtues of filial piety and loyalty as well as respecting your teachers and learning how to become a good judge of people.
How did Asia fare in the best books’ races in the English language press? On the whole, it seems better than last year. The following (unscientific) sampling uses a broad definition of “Asian” in it’s selection, but nevertheless, the number of books about Asia, by Asian authors, in translation seems to have increased in the past twelve months, at least as far as end-of-year listings are concerned.
For the better part of a century, painters flocked to Paris. Mary Cassatt and James Whistler came from the United States, Gris and Picasso from Spain, Kandinsky from Russia. Paris was the place to be even for, as is less known, for Chinese artists. It is a curious comment on China’s interaction with Art-with-a-capital-A that while many people will be familiar with Monet, few (including, one suspects, the Chinese themselves) will know much if anything about Pan Yu-lin (or Pan Yuliang, as she is also known).
The concept of “soft power”, popularized by Harvard’s Joseph Nye, has always seemed artificial. Power as wielded by nations is not neatly divisible into “hard” and “soft” categories. The great realist philosopher of power Hans Morgenthau identified the elements of national power as geography, natural resources, industrial capacity, population, military preparedness, national morale, the quality of government, and the quality of diplomacy.
A subjective list of some books we particularly liked this year. Fiction (in translation and not), history, biography, literature, society, memoir, photography, religion, covering Asia from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, from Siberia to India.
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