Mass weddings in China-New Life Movement
This is a picture from a New Life Movement Mass Wedding in Nanjing. Couples could be married for a fee of only $20 after filling out a few forms and being check...
Author: Alan Baumler
Syllabus blogging HIST 437 Modern Japan and the Taisho project
Update Here is the more or less final draft So, a bit late,but some syllabus blogging for Fall. At present this is supposed to be an in-person class. Thi...
The changing Chinese press
Cécile Armand has been posting on her work on the evolution of the Republican-era Chinese press, based on Carl Crow’s Newspaper Directory of China. Althou...
Teaching East Asia In the Humanities
This looks like a cool conference, at least till the last panel. Teaching East Asia In the Humanities April 24-25, 2021 https://www.teachinghumanities.com/confe...
The economics of maize
Here, for your teaching pleasure, is a long quote on the value of corn (maize) in China. I often mention in class that New World crops were economically valuabl...
Korean social history through yadam
I was recently sent a copy of Si Nae Park The Korean Vernacular Story: Telling Tales of Contemporary Chosŏn in Sinographic Writing (Columbia U.P., 2020) It̵...
The Songs of Chu
Columbia University Press sent me a copy of Gopal Suku’s new translation of Qu Yuan’s The Songs of Chu. I am not qualified to speak about it as a scholarly tran...
Syllabus blogging Fall 2020 -HIST 433 China 1300-1800 The Late Imperial Age
There is a tradition here of blogging about our syllabi and asking for advice. This is my upper-division class for the semester, where I want to push students i...
Syllabus blogging for Fall 2020 HIST 206 History of East Asia
There is a tradition here of blogging about our syllabi and asking for advice. Fall semester will be a bit different. We will be doing hybrid (well, actually Ha...
Can you speak Chinese?
Friend-of-the-blog Gina Tam1 has a new book out.Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960 Cambridge University Press, 2020 It is a really remarkable s...
Was Late Imperial China Early Modern?
Zou Jiajun posted on the Sinologists Facebook group asking how the term “Early Modern” got to be used in China studies. This is a an interesting question, since...
Art and status and women and mirrors and…
This is an image from the back of a Song dynasty mirror in the collection of Martin J. Powers. As he describes it One [woman], on the right, tends a child and s...
Dress and identity in the Qing
I have been reading Guojun Wang’s Staging Personhood: Costuming in Early Qing Drama. I am not particularly a student of drama, or of costume, but in the T...
Masks in recent Chinese History
So this is a post that already seems outdated, but I thought I would do it anyway. Masks now mean something quite different than they did before, and I am sure ...
Mapping China from the air
Since I have been posting maps, I thought I would put this up. This is from Shigeru Kobayashi 小林茂, Gaihōzu : Teikoku Nihon no Ajia chizu 外邦図 : 帝国日本のアジア地図 (Tōk...