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.
If you only read one book by the prolific and (now) venerable John Man, it should perhaps be this one, literally so for it “revises and condenses” several chapters in his other books Genghis Khan, The Terracotta Army, Barbarians at the Wall, The Great Wall and Xanadu. It is, as one might expect from Man,…
September 2nd will mark the 80th anniversary of Japan’s formal surrender to the United States aboard the USS Missouri, ending the Second World War. The US decision to drop two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—what drove Japan to surrender, at least in popular history—is still controversial to this day.
Chinese travelers first made their way to the Maldives in the Indian Ocean in the 14th century, looking for goods like coconuts, cowries, and ambergris. That started centuries of travel to the islands, including one trip by famed sailor Zheng He. Then, quickly, the Maldives—and the broader Indian Ocean—vanished as Ming China turned inward.
Four decades of Japanese colonialism in Korea ended abruptly in August 1945. It took three weeks for US troops to arrive, which started almost three years of US military occupation. By the end of the occupation, Korea was permanently divided into North and South, with Seoul set on an authoritarian path that would persist for…
Ankara-born Chris Aslan spent seven years living in Khiva, an old Silk Road town in what is now Uzbekistan, where he founded a silk carpet workshop. Expelled in 2005 during a purge of foreign NGOs, he then spent three years in Khorog, a town on the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border. Told by the authorities that perhaps he’d…
A dynamic and interactionist multiplex order existed in the classical eastern Indian Ocean corresponding with modern Southeast Asia (~1st—15th centuries CE). This regional order was not the product of superior Chinese imperial/material power, or some essentialist version of the tributary system. Nor did Indic ideas spread “naturally” into an ideational vacuum in Southeast Asia. This…
Did you know Hong Kong used to be a hub for pirates? That factoid has long been part of the popular history for Hong Kong—and for Southern China broadly. For centuries, Chinese pirates raided merchants and coastal communities up and down the Chinese coast, taking advantage of weak imperial rule and safe havens like what’s…
Had the eminent physicist Ernest Rutherford actually once said that “all science is either physics or stamp collecting”, he might have botany in mind, a discipline the very basis of which is collecting and labelling plants according to strict taxonomies. In her (perhaps aptly entitled) new book, Unmaking Botany, Kathleen C Gutierrez sets about describing…
My first brush with a Chinese post office was in August 1994, shortly after I arrived in Wuhan to teach English at a medical university. Back then, mailing letters home to the United States was an arduous ritual that I undertook in a drab communications building. I’d jostle in a scrum, stretch a letter over…
In 1945 to 1946, postwar India was enthralled by the treason trial of three officers—formerly of the Indian National Army, who fought against the British in the Second World War. The trial sparked outrage across the country, among ordinary people, members of the pro-independence movement and, worryingly for the British Raj, members of the Indian…
Japan is a favourite destination for tourists the world over, but one reason it appeals to Hong Kong tourists (for whom it is a particular favourite) is that Kanji allows them to more or less work things out despite not knowing Japanese at all. Zev Handel’s new book Chinese Characters Across Asia tells the story…
Geographic labels are sometimes misnomers. The Dead Sea’s name is not, for the most part. Its high salinity levels kill most forms of life, barring a couple hardy microbes and algae—and even these are threatened by environmental change. Except the Dead Sea has been part of human history for millennia. Jericho, the world’s oldest city,…
What is Hinduism? For centuries, that question was particularly thorny, both for local Indians and for colonial outsiders. People inside and outside the country tried to define what Hinduism was. Missionaries grappled with Hindu practices, finding both similarities and dangerous differences with their own Christian faith. The East India Company adopted several Hindu rituals to…
In 1946, Kornel Chang’s Korean grandparents fled south from Pyongyang across the border at the 38th parallel, leaving the zone under Soviet military occupation for the one occupied by the US military. Years later, his family left South Korea for the United States. This book is born of conversations heard by Chang growing up in…