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...
Author: Alan Baumler
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...
Text Slang
Via Wandering to Tamshui a post with illustrations of Taiwanese text slang I suppose there are important points to be made about this, but not this week. I only...
Japan's war guilt
As is being discussed elsewhere, the Dower exhibit on Visualizing Cultures has become controversial, as it contains images that some people find offensive, spec...
Imperial Self-Images
This is a picture of the Empress Dowager Cixi She is shown in the guise of Guanyin attended by two of her eunuchs in the guise of bodhisattvas. 1 According to P...