You are nimble in warfare!
Two Western Zhou bronze inscriptions, both dating from around 850 B.C. and describing the war against the Xianyun1 It was the ninth month, first auspiciousness,...
Author: Alan Baumler
China and the atom bomb
How is “common knowledge” different in China than elsewhere? At present of course things are increasingly the same, but that is due in part to years...
A sinologist in Iraq
Graham Peck’s Two Kinds of Time has been re-issued. This is good news for everyone, and especially for those of us who got a copy for Christmas. (Thanks S...
Like mixing water with water
Students often come to classes on China looking for the Timeless Wisdom of the Easttm As a historian I tend to dislike giving it to them, since the point of his...
Weird pictures
BibliOdyssey has a post up on European images of 17th century Japan. Yes, I know. Who cares about Japan? There is also a link to an older post on Athanasius Kir...
Making China democratic
Over at A Ku Indeed people have been discussing Bell’s East and West, which is an attempt to create a dialogue between Western and Eastern concepts of rig...
Starting a new year
As is something of a tradition here, these are my syllabai for the upcoming semester. East Asia Early China Honors College Unit C on bronzes and classical China...
R.I.P. John DeFrancis
Via Granite Studio
Meet the meat
Foreigners have two contradictory images of “Chinese men”. One is the effeminate scholar with long fingernails and the other is the kung fu dude. Th...
I like sex better than bear paws
Over at A Ku Indeed people, including myself, have been discussing Daniel Bell’s East Meets West which looks at the importation of foreign concepts of hum...
Flithy Asians
One of my colleagues recently passed on his copy of The Far East by James H. Maurer Sentinel Printing, 1912. The author says that the book is not the product of...
Confucian liberalism
CDT has some information on Yang Shiqun, the Chinese professor who has been accused by two of his students of saying counterrevolutionary things in class and is...
Charter 08 and reading about human rights
The big news from China is the release of Charter 08 The charter is being released now because it is the 60th anniversary of the UN’s Universal Declaratio...
Teaching about Chinese Bronzes
As the semester is winding down, our academic readers are no doubt very busy doing their work. If you would like to do my work, however, we have something of a ...
The origins of World Beat (Lu Buwei on music)
I’ve been talking about rites and music in Xunzi. To sort of finish off I want to look at some stuff from Lu Buwei. For those of you who don’t know ...