Cultural critique today and yesterday
Feng Zikai rides a grass mud horse It’s not his work, I think, but it looks a lot like it.
Author: Alan Baumler
Chin music
Today is Opening Day, and the Cubs are in first place, so all is well with the world. I just got a copy of Yu Junwei’s Playing in Isolation: A History of ...
Why Asians are different from (Latin) Americans
In a recent speech Zhou Xiaochuan gave a nice clear summary of the reasons for Asian economic exceptionalism and the cultural (and therefore apparently mostly u...
Academics read the newspaper
And find good things (On time zones in China) And bad things (On Qing cultural history) Both of these articles are attempts by non-specialists to explain China,...
Bad Daoism
Calling Sam Crane. Apparently Laozi is the best way to understand modern American Conservatism. Original here. Favorable notice here. It is nice to know that L...
I may never have to teach again
As the Chinese movie industry gears up for a biopic on Confucius I get closer and closer to my goal of never having to do any work. Soon I will be able to just...
Management by Hard Liquor
A description of the administrative methods of the Han Dynasty chancellor Cao Shen Day and night he drank strong liquor. Everyone from the aristocratic high off...
Mysteries of History (transportation division)
Here is a bit of a puzzle for our readers to clear up. A while back I pointed at a nice collection of 17th Century Dutch pictures of Japan. Jonathan Dresner was...
When America looked East (or maybe West)
Speechwars.com lets you see how many times American presidents have used various words in their State of the Union addresses. This is not a perfect representati...
Need a dissertation topic?
There is a very interesting review of Simon Winchester’s Bomb, Book, and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China (sold in America as The Ma...
Ming Dynasty tax revolt
Historians write a lot about taxes, in part because we are often interested in states and what they do, and taxes are something that states do a lot of. Taxatio...
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,...
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...