China has been one of the leading sources of overseas visitors to the Maldives in recent years. Bin Yang, a professor of history at City University of Hong Kong, makes the argument in Discovered but Forgotten that this is to some extent a rerun of the situation in the 14th and 15th centuries when the Maldives were firmly on Chinese maps of places to visit.
China
A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. Gonçalo Lobo Pinheiro’s photographs of Macau are certainly worth that and more. This latest collection consists of 100 photos taken during the last five years, a period which included Covid-19. The photojournalist, who been resident in Macau for well over a decade manages both to capture something of the inexpressible essence of the city, as well to provide visuals that will intrigue and engage anyone interested in either cities and the people that live in them. The “poética” of the title is apt.
Most people “collect” stuff, but Paul Bromberg is a “collector”, the difference being that he proceeds with intent and purpose, focusing on a relatively narrow group of objects.
Pirates and piracy seem to be about as universal as death and taxes, and Chinese and Western piracy bear much in common, from violence and hardship, to oppression from the authorities as both cause and consequence, as well as a certain amount of popular romanticism. In Outlaws of the Sea, Robert J Antony provides an overview of the Chinese version of the phenomenon, situated “along the southern coast of China and in the South China Sea between the 1630s and 1940s,” which he places firmly in the broader sweep of Chinese history.
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 emerges in Wuhan, leading to chaos as officials frantically try to figure out how to control the new disease.
Nánhǎi 南海, the South Sea, took on a new dimension for the Chinese after the capital Kaifeng fell to the Jurchen in 1127, precluding contacts north of the Yellow River. The retreating Southern Song dynasty (1127-1274) had to turn to the South China Sea, as it is now universally called, to provide a new outlet for the country’s manufacturing prowess. Zhejiang emerged then as the political, economic and cultural heartland, with Hangzhou as the new capital; while the coastal provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, cradle of Chinese shipwrights and seafarers, spearheaded a veritable, if peaceful, maritime expansion. Until the 9th-10th centuries, China’s maritime trade was mainly conducted by foreigners—Arabs, Persians, Indians, Southeast Asians—on their own vessels, with the Chinese starting to take an active role afterwards.
Karissa Chen’s debut novel, Homeseeking, a sweeping family saga set across eight decades, is informed in part by her grandfather’s story. In her author’s note, she writes that she became interested in Chinese exiles in Taiwan a couple decades ago, just after her grandfather’s death. One of the images from her grandfather’s belongings was a photo of her grandfather crying before his mother’s grave in Shanghai. He was especially distraught because he hadn’t seen his mother since he left China just before the Communist victory in 1949 and was unable to return more than half a century later, after his mother passed away.
Many authors have written about the Manila Galleons, the massive ships that took goods back and forth between Acapulco and Manila, ferrying silver one way, and Chinese-made goods the other. But how did the Galleons actually work? Who paid for them? How did buyers and sellers negotiate with each other? Who set the rules? Why on earth did the shippers decide to send just one galleon a year?
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.
Books can be the subjects of podcasts, podcasts can spawn books, but only rarely does a podcast itself rise to be a possible stand-in for a book. Paul Cooper’s recent two-part podcast “The Mongols: Terror of the Steppe” is one of these.
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