Author: Alan Baumler
Chairman Mao’s teacher
A nice article in Modern China on Mao’s teacher Yang Changji. The article draws on Yeh Wen-Hsin’s work on the provincial background of many of the second group ...
Keeping Halal in the Ming dynasty
As regular readers know, I am interested in the question of how people are defined as Chinese. One nice bit of data comes from Hans Kuhner. He is looking at a p...
Cinderella, dressed in yellow, went to Scotland and kissed a fellow
Via Cliopatria, a website with Scottish broadsides from 1810-1830. One is obviously satirical, announcing the arrival of a Chinese doctor Dr. Puff Stuff Sham Qu...
Ancient Chinese sex advice
One scholar who has had a lot of influence on my teaching on Early China is Mark Edward Lewis. I sometimes assign Sanctioned Violence in Early China, and if I h...
No need for Clever Speech
It is recorded in the Han chronicles that when Emperor Wen visited his pleasure park he went to the area called Tiger Garden. There he questioned the official i...
Military history MIA? WIA? KIA?
There has been a good deal of discussion on Cliopatria and elsewhere on the topic of military history. This discussion was sparked off by a piece in the Nationa...
Double Ten
Coming soon is Double Ten, the anniversary of the Oct. 10, 1911 Wuhan revolt that led to the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the foundation of the Republic of ...
Electrons, the ultimate export
Preview of a documentary on gold-mining in China http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho5Yxe6UVv4 I hope my son never sees this post, which suggests that you really c...
Frederic Wakeman, 1937-2006
Obituary here We used his Fall of Imperial China as a text when I was an undergrad, and The Great Enterprise was one of the first things I read in grad school. ...
Arrrrgh, Jun lad,
Today is international talk like a pirate day, which was created to prove that the internet does not always have to be a place of serious scholarship and high-m...
Acting quickly, he formed a committee to study the issue
Via Crooked Timber, an adaptation of Little Sisters of the Grasslands that will appeal to anyone who likes Maoist kitsh, or who works in an American university,...