First looks at China, or some aspect of it, at least those that have impinged on the broader consciousness, have often been travelogues. Think Peter Hessler’s River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze or Tim Clissold’s Mr China. Over the years, these books have covered expats, farmers, millennials, businessmen, but despite China’s ever deeper involvement…
Kashmir has always been the point of connection between South Asia, Central Asia and Xinjiang. Winding their way through the mighty Himalaya, Pamir and Karakoram Mountain ranges, traders, travelers and officials created a series of close historic economic, cultural and political ties that have bound the region together.
India’s former Foreign Secretary and Ambassador to China Vijay Gokhale in his new book Crosswinds offers a fascinating account of India’s diplomacy in four specific events during 1949 through 1959: the formal recognition of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Indochina War, and the two Taiwan Strait crises. India’s diplomatic role was encouraged by…
Over the last thirty years, Shanghai has been demarcated by the two sides of the Pudong River, the almost-futuristic Pudong and the historic Puxi. These two areas inspire the title of Aube Rey Lescure’s impressive debut novel, River East River West, a story of people more complicated and layered than they may first appear, set…
Over the course of two centuries (between 133 BCE and 89 CE), China’s Han empire fought a series of conflicts with a confederation of nomadic steppe peoples known as Xiongnu. As Scott Forbes Crawford notes in his fast-moving, readable narrative history The Han-Xiongnu War, the Han and Xiongnu were east Asian “superpowers” whose struggle for…
Angie Chau’s discussion of five Chinese literary and visual artists who sojourned in Paris between (for the most part) the First and Second World War explores, in an academic way, the notion of “transposition”, a usage she has coined to describe how artists navigated the two environments—Chinese and French—they encountered and operated in. Non-academic readers…
Ming China in 1642 had suffered a series of disasters. Floods, and then drought had destroyed successive rice crops, sending the price of grain to astronomical levels. As one schoolteacher wrote: “There was no rice in the market to buy. Even if a dealer had grain, people passed by without asking the price. The rich…
Diego Javier Luis hardly bothers explaining to his readers that of course there were Asians in the Americas centuries before the California Gold Rush and the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. But given the common and almost automatic conflation of the United States with “America”, it can nevertheless come as a surprise that Mexico had…
Coming to the end of its run, this exhibition of Bronze Age artifacts is well-named: “gaze” is about all one can do at objects for which there are few if any visual or artistic touch-points. No culture is entirely unique, but second-millennium BCE Sanxingdui comes as close as any. And without any written records, very…
On an August night in 1933 Harbin in then-Japanese controlled Manchuria, Semyon Kaspe, French citizen, famed concert musician, and Russian Jew, is abducted after a night out. Suspicion falls on the city’s fervently anti-semitic Russian fascists. Yet despite pressure from the French consulate, the Japanese police slow-walk the investigation—and three months later, Semyon is found…
At last someone has found a practical application for virtual reality. Brian Kwok teaches design at Hong Kong’s Polytechnic University and he has been studying Hong Kong’s neon signs and the culture that surrounds them. It has convinced him that they should be preserved. But how? Kwok has a really difficult row to hoe, and…
Like countless other migrants from China, Hugo Wong’s great-grandfathers–Wong Foon Chuck and Leung Hing—travel across the Pacific to make a life for themselves in San Francisco. Unlike many of their peers, they don’t stay, instead traveling south, to Mexico—in part to escape growing anti-Chinese prejudice in the United States.
In 1929, Bernardine Szold Fritz left Paris on a train bound for China. She was on her way to her fourth wedding, and her fourth husband: An American investment banker named Chester Fritz, who’d proposed after a whirlwind meeting earlier in Shanghai. Bernardine is then forced to find herself things to do in interwar China—and…
You never know what’ll show up in the archives. In 2015, Benjamin Penny stumbled across the 19th-century diaries of one Chaloner Alabaster in the Special Collections room of London’s SOAS. Alabaster left England in August 1855 to take up a position as “student interpreter” in the China Consular Service. He ended up making a career…
“The fall of the Ming dynasty,” writes Timothy Brook in his fascinating new monograph The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China, “has traditionally been narrated as a period of political factionalism, failed administration, dwindling tax revenues, and rural rebellion, all of which has been shrouded by the larger…