Li Qingzhao (1084-1151 CE) is considered the greatest woman poet in Chinese history but, as translator Wendy Chen writes in her introduction, Li “remains relatively unknown in the West.” Chen, who first heard Li’s poetry as a child, is determined to help change this. The Magpie at Night is Chen’s translation of the Song-dynasty writer…
The Northern Wei (386-534) are having a moment. Heritage projects, including large-scale digitization efforts, have brought renewed attention to Northern Wei sites of Buddhist statuary, including the Yungang and Longmen grottoes. The live-action Mulan movie thrust the iconic “Chinese” heroine, believed to originate in the multicultural milieux of the Northern Wei, back into the global…
The 1920s and 1930s were a period of cosmopolitan globalization—and no one, perhaps, exemplified it more than Victor Sassoon, business tycoon, trader and industrialist. He’s the subject of Rosemary Wakeman’s latest book The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918–1941 which traces Victor’s journey through these three cities—and explores how the world economy changes…
Some years back as a graduate student enrolled in a mandatory DEI training for college teaching, I distinctly recall raising a question about dealing with the unabashed misogyny, depictions of sexual violence and child abuse bursting out of the primary sources so often used in the history classroom. Encountering More Swindles from the Late Ming:…
China’s history under the Communist Party has been demarcated, like geological ages, into neat, self-contained phases. There is the Great Leap Forward (1958-62); the Cultural Revolution (1966-76); and Reform and Opening (December 1978-1989). The bits outside these branded groups of years, including the first nine years of CCP rule, can feel a little fuzzy, while…
Kwai-Cheung Lo’s Ethnic Minority Cinema in China’s Nation-State Building investigates the convoluted relations between cinematic productions about non-Han ethnic minorities and China’s nation-state building project from the early Republican era of the 1920s to the current authoritarian regime in the 21st century.
Released in late 2024, 100 years after the most infamous mountaineering event in history, Other Everests: one mountain, many worlds is not a retelling of the Mallory expedition, but rather an attempt to widen the framing of Everest beyond western mountaineering exploits. Everest has often been seen through the eyes of western explorers and been…
Beijing Bound captures a pivotal moment in China’s recent history through the lens of Glen Loveland, a young American who arrived in Beijing in 2007 with little more than ambition and a tourist visa. Once a congressional press secretary, Loveland chronicles his remarkable transformation from a bewildered expatriate to becoming the first foreign HR professional…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…