Ever thought about doing a blog post on the history of the Chinese wheelbarrow, drawing many of your facts from Needham, but illustrating it with lots of cool pictures? Don’t bother. It’s been done.1
Via DeLong
Another entry in the wars over the origins of pasta.
Finally, to perhaps follow up on the Yellow Kid, Scott Seligman’s “The Night New York’s Chinese Went Out for Jews How a 1903 Chinatown fundraiser for pogrom victims united two persecuted peoples”
from China Heritage Quarterly
admittedly the piece does have the annoying habit of dating everything to a vague ‘Ancient China’, which for my undergrads includes everything from Peking Man to the death of Mao in 1976, but it is still a nice post ↩
Just a comment on a reference to “stuck a noodle in his cap and called it macaroni” in the song Yankee Doodle Dandy. I would suggest it had nothing to do with pasta, and everything to do with ‘macaraon’ French for a round badge, and specifically the regimental badges worn on the headgear of soldiers. When ending a line in a song, the pronunciation would be “macaron-ey”. Readers might recall that the French had a lot to do with training and supporting the Continental Armies during the American revolution.