Pwin-u-Lwin is a town in upper Burma, situated in the hills east of Mandalay, known for its cool climate. Yet for many, Pwin-u-Lwin is better known as Maymyo. Renamed in 1896 after the head of the 5th Bengal infantry, Colonel James May, Maymyo was the most famous hill station in colonial Burma. The British occupied…
Knowledge is power. This is a statement often made to reinforce the relentless pursuit of data, information and know-how to get ahead in business and technology. Scholarship or studiousness is seen as a virtue that can give one an edge over the others in the face of tough competition. With such a celebration of knowledge,…
“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…
The paperback edition of Emily Hahn’s novel, Miss Jill from Shanghai, is billed on the cover as “a beautiful girl’s story of salvation and sin in the Orient”. Jill was an Australian woman who became romantically involved with a married Japanese aristocrat. Her own parents never married and she felt “degraded beyond imagination” by her…
The northeast Indian state of Assam has had a complex history. As independence loomed, Assam was a large British province, bordering the fellow British colony of Burma and covering a large segment of India’s northeast. Today’s Assam is much smaller: First Partition cut Assam off from the rest of India, with just a tiny “chicken…
The venerable Charles Allen left perhaps his most contentious subject for his last (and posthumously-published) book. The Aryans: The Search for a People, a Place and a Myth is a wide-ranging discourse on history, science, archaeology, linguistics, the history of all four, interleaved with commentary on some two centuries of highly-objectionable politics and political discourse:…
If there were ever a question regarding the role of regional “indie” publishers, Unseen Burma should answer it. Who else but Bangkok-based River Books would bring out a book with a local collector’s century’s worth of photographs of this usually out-of-sight, out-of-mind country?
Among the current surfeit of books that claim to explain China, Terminus: Westward Expansion, China, and the End of American Empire, a new treatise on Sino-American relations, distinguishes itself by placing the current bilateral tensions in the context of almost two and half centuries of American expansion (“imperial expansion” as author Stuart Rollo puts it)…
Silk—a luxury fabric, a valuable trade good, and a scientific marvel. This material, created by the bombyx mori silkworm, has captivated artisans for centuries—and it captivated science presenter and writer Aarathi Prasad, who was studying the scientific potential of silk for new treatments.
Electrifying Indonesia tells the story of the entanglement of politics and technology during Indonesia’s rapid post-World War II development. As a central part of its nation-building project, the Indonesian state sought to supply electricity to the entire country, bringing transformative socioeconomic benefits across its heterogeneous territories and populations.
In the opening chapter of Susumu Higa’s manga, Okinawa, a group of Japanese soldiers land on a Ryukyuan island to prepare for World War II’s Battle of Okinawa. A child asks her principal whether the soldiers will occupy their island forever. “Until they know all of us are safe,” he replies. His words are an…
Harbin was a new city around the end of both the Qing dynasty and the Russian Empire. It was built to support the Chinese Eastern Railway and also became home to a sizable Jewish community numbering around twenty thousand. That community has long vanished and all that remains are the old synagogues and other buildings…
It was common during the years of the U.S. invasion of Iraq to talk about the Sunni-Shia split—and how the sectarian violence was the result of a “centuries-long hatred” between the two different religious schools. But seeing this divide as the result of a longstanding feud—or to see it in the model of other religious…
By any measure, Jewish American writer-cum-Shanghai-based salonnière Bernardine Szold Fritz (1896-1982) led an extraordinary life. Whether on familiar terms with American writers of the Lost Generation (Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway) and French modernist masters (Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso) in and around Paris, or influential Chinese writers and intellectuals during 1930s Shanghai (Lin Yutang, Hu Shi),…
Why would an inkstone have a poem inscribed on it? Early modern Chinese writers did not limit themselves to working with brushes and ink, and their texts were not confined to woodblock-printed books or the boundaries of the paper page. Poets carved lines of verse onto cups, ladles, animal horns, seashells, walking sticks, boxes, fans,…