Centered on the eastern half of Java and coming to control most of what would later become Indonesia, as well as Singapore, Malaysia and parts of Thailand during the 14th and 15th centuries, Majapahit may be the most significant empire that most people have never heard of. There are physical remains, but not as well-preserved or grand as those of Borobudur or Prambanan from an earlier period. And insofar as one might have heard of someone from Majapahit, it’s more likely to be the formidable prime minister Gajah Mada than one of the kings. Majapahit was calling out for an accessible history.
In 330 BC, Alexander the Great conquers the city of Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Persian Empire. His troops later burn it to the ground, capping centuries of tensions between the Hellenistic Greeks and Macedonians and the Persians.
Opera Hong Kong chose Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail for its annual summer semi-staged production at the Hong Kong City Hall, held 17-18 August 2025. The production, directed by Tang Xinxin and conducted by Michael Koehler, was sung in German with dialogue in English (and a large smattering of Chinese).
Fiction set in the time of Indian freedom struggle draws attention to the lives of ordinary people against the background of great socio-political upheavals. That this period’s history can be juxtaposed with personal stories about being queer is the achievement of translator and scholar Ruth Vanita’s second novel A Slight Angle.
Gerda Philipsborn, Jewish and a part of the 1920s Berlin arts scene, developed a close friendship with a trio of Muslim Indian students. A decade later, she would move to India to join her friends at Jamia Millia Islamia, a university in Aligarh that was established in 1920 to boycott the colonial government’s educational institutions. Margrit Pernau’s captivating biography shows how Philipsborn ended up in India just before Hitler came to power in Germany. However unlikely the story may seem, Pernau provides a comprehensive narrative of the political movements and openness of 1920s Berlin that explains just how Philipsborn came to spend her final years at Jamia Millia Islamia.
Like many stories, Amy’s begins long before she was born. Amy is an “all-American” young woman from Hawaii, but author Sherri L Smith and illustrator Christine Norrie start their graphic novel Pearl in 1886 in Japan, where Amy’s sosōbo (great-grandmother) is a pearl diver from Okinawa.
The influence of China on Japanese arts, culture and thought has been enormous. Yet, it varied widely across time. Periods of intense exposure and assimilation, as when the archipelago adopted Buddhism in the 6th century along with the logographic script that made its transmission possible, were often followed by decades, if not centuries, of distancing and assimilation. Today, anxiety about the growing power of China pervades sentiment, but until the late 19th century, admiration was widespread. The Middle Kingdom inspired fascination rather than fear.
Pity the poor archaeologists who lie on their bellies in sand or mud and painstakingly dust off bits of fossilized wood or bone, ceramics or metal scraps. It is, however, from their patient work that scientific truth progresses. Our understanding of the natural history of the horse has galloped ahead in the 21st century. As late as 1996, a scholarly book on Arabian horses could claim Saudi Arabia as the birthplace of this animal.
Shanghailanders, the debut novel from Juli Min, starts at the end: Leo, a wealthy Shanghai businessman, sees his wife and daughters off at the airport as they travel to Boston. Everyone, it seems, is unhappy.
The late British historian Paul Johnson devoted an entire chapter of his 1983 classic Modern Times to what he called the “Bandung Generation”—the leaders of former European colonies in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia who in April 1955 gathered in Bandung, Indonesia to form a non-aligned movement in the midst of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Johnson dismissed the group as a collection of moral poseurs “adept at words, but not much else”. Andrea Benvenuti, an associate professor of international relations at the University of South Wales, is not as dismissive about Bandung and its organizers as Johnson was, but he, too, concludes that Bandung failed to bring about its professed goal of “Afro-Asian solidarity”.
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