The good life
I came across this story while reading the Liaozhai 聊斋 The Loyal Mouse According to Yang Tianyi, once he saw two mice coming out of a hole. One was swallowed by...
Author: Alan Baumler
Yellow Peril
I’ve been re-reading some Jack London stories of late, and being struck by the Chinese in them. There are actually a lot of Chinese, as the areas he tended to w...
Voice of the people
One nice thing about Chinese history is that there is a long history of recording popular songs. From the Han at least it was assumed that popular songs reflect...
We’re not in Hebei anymore, Toto
A Chinese Peasant Pearl Buck has been getting a good deal more attention in China of late. Part of it is no doubt the fact that she wrote about China and won th...
Tibet by rail
It has been in the news of late that China has built a rail line to Tibet. It cost $3.2 billion, and the train cars have to be pressurized, but you can now get ...
Creating East Asia
东亚三国的近现代史 A History of Modern and Contemporary East Asia is a book that got a lot of press when it first came out, since it was written by a team of scholars fr...
Even Barbarians can become good
How does one become a good person? That is a question that crops up a lot when one reads the Confucians. In fact, for Confucians the processes of self-cultivati...
The World before Google
One of the reasons I write this blog is to preserve things, mostly for myself. I often come across something that might be useful to teach with later, and blogg...
Six Dynasties blogging
One of the things I have been doing for fun this summer is reading Family Instructions for the Yen clan 顏氏家訓by Yen Chih-t’ui 顏之推 (T’eng Ssu-Yu trans Leiden 1968...
Mao vs. Hitler
I’m not trying to make this blog all Mao all the time, but as we seem to be discussing him a lot, and Johnathan just brought up the issue of popular memory agai...
Thank you for not smoking
Today is 6-3 anti-opium day in the Nanjing period and Anti-Smoking Day on Taiwan. It commemorates Lin Zexu’s destruction of the British Opium at Humen. In...
My Great Helmsman is Charlton Heston
In an interesting article on the gun trade and state control of weapons in Guangdong province in the 1920’s Qiu Jie and He Wenping make an interesting argument ...
Chairman Mao is like Jesus to us
Not really related to anything, but I found it interesting. Chinese students in New Zealand have been protesting this image of Chairman Mao from a student newsp...
Visualizing cultures
The M.I.T. site is back up. The most controversial part was the section on Old China, New Japan. There is a cache of the old version here The only change that I...