Begum Wilayat Mahal, the self-proclaimed heir to the House of Awadh, has fascinated journalists and writers for decades. She claimed she was Indian royalty, descended from the kings of Awadh, a kingdom annexed by the British in 1856. She spent a decade in the waiting room of the New Delhi train station, receiving journalists intrigued…
Tipu Sultan, known as the “Tiger of Mysore”, ruled the southern Indian kingdom of Mysore from 1782 to 1799. Born in 1750 to Haidar Ali, a military leader who gained power through strategic alliances, Tipu inherited a strong state during colonial upheaval. He led Mysore to prominence, fighting the British East India Company in the…
Writers have long found it useful to approach the tumult of modern China through the lives of those leaders born around or shortly after the turn of the twentieth century: men whose careers stretched across the subsequent decades of revolution, war, political turmoil and economic transformation. In the last twelve months we have already had…
This epic story centres on an irresistible premise: is the main character “Her Royal Highness, The Begum of Oudh, Shehzadi Wilayat Mahal, Heir to the Last King of Oudh Begum Hazrat Mahal and Wajid Ali Shah” … or just plain old “Mrs Butt”? Satisfyingly, even the latter more prosaic option “Mrs Butt”—horse-loving wife of an…
The Kims, of North Korea, are perhaps the 21st century’s most successful family dictatorship—if only due to sheer longevity, having run North Korea for the almost eight decades since the country’s post-war founding. Kim Il-sung led North Korea for over half that time, from its founding in 1948 to Kim’s death in 1994.
Best known in Singapore as the writer and performer of the smash-hit comedy album “Why U So like dat?’, Siva Choy was a multi-talented musician, journalist, stand-up comedian, movie actor and teacher. An intimate and revealing new book paints an affectionate portrait of a life filled with pioneering artistic endeavour.
Ma Thanegi’s roots are deeply planted in Myanmar. She’s the great-niece of a noble scoundrel who once ornamented the court of King Thibaw, her country’s last king, and the great-granddaughter of one of the last queen’s ladies-in-waiting. The daughter of a sophisticated, mercurial intellectual and the brilliant, tempestuous beauty who was his wife, Ma Thanegi…
Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You, Candice Chung’s “memoir of saying the unsayable with food”, feels like a glimpse into her peri-pandemic journal. The title refers to the often-shared recognition by the children of immigrants, that expressions of love are indirect, and also filtered through food.
Fyodor Tertitskiy, a young and prolific academic specialist on North Korean affairs working in Seoul, has written a biography of the first North Korean leader that is both highly readable and extensively researched.
As Merle Oberon starred in four dozen films during the golden age of Hollywood, she kept a secret that could have immediately destroyed her career: she was biracial and was born and raised in India. While no longer a secret, her story has all but been forgotten. Mayukh Sen’s new biography of Oberon, Love, Queenie:…
Kishore Mahbubani, longtime Singaporean diplomat and academic, opens his new memoir with a provocative line: “Blame it on the damn British.” Kishore, who later served as Singapore’s ambassador to the UN and founding dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, was born to poor migrants in Singapore, studied philosophy on a government…
In 2019, journalist and writer Peter Hessler traveled with his family to China. He’d gotten a gig as a teacher of writing—nonfiction writing in particular—in what he’d hoped would be a sequel to his 2001 book River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. But plans changed—radically. At the very end of 2019, the COVID-19 virus…
When defenders of the British royal family scrounged around for dirt on Wallis Simpson, the divorced US-born fiancée of King Edward VIII, they often highlighted her year spent in China—often sharing scurrilous, and poorly-sourced, if not entirely unfounded, details of her time there.
For two decades, Singaporean diplomat and author Kishore Mahbubani has been a leading voice among a growing group of intellectuals and pundits publicizing the “Asian Twenty-First Century”, a triumphalist arc where Asian powers—especially a rising China—have cast off the shackles of Western colonialism to assume their “rightful” place atop in the global hierarchy of nations…
Today, the Hong Kong Philharmonic is one of the world’s great symphony orchestras. But when John Duffus landed in Hong Kong in 1979 as the Philharmonic’s general manager—its fifth in as many years—he quickly learned just how much work needed to be done to make a Western symphony orchestra work in a majority Chinese city.