Gresham’s Law
The Great Yuan—how grave and dignified, Its authority by the crafty and duplicitous monopolized. ‘Repairing’ the Yellow River dikes [1351], ‘reforming’ th...
Author: Alan Baumler
The Chairman vanishes (but is found again!)
One of the nice things about teaching modern China is that the Communists, as a text-centered party, wrote a lot of things. A lot of them have been translated i...
The modern Confucius
An advertisement from the 20’s or 30’s, reprinted in上海广告. 上海：上海画报出版社, 1995. This ad is for Golden Arrow cigarettes, and it announces a special contest. If you c...
Happy Birthday China! Happy Birthday Freedom!
According to People’s Daily English Edition China has turned 5,056 years old today. 5,000 years of timeless Chinese civilization, plus 56 years of New China. Al...
Yuan Shikai, Daoist
Another neat thing from Tales of Old China. They have a whole section of French Images, which mostly seem to be postcards and newspaper clippings from somewhere...
China is dirty
Many of our countless readers already know this resource, but one of the things I like to read and teach with is Tales of Old China, a website put up by SinoMed...
What is a family?
Via Reason’s Hit and Run I find this story about a Taiwanese women who wanted to harvest the sperm of her recently deceased fiancée so that she could get pregna...
Seven steps to a better Sichuan. (part 1)
One of the things I came across recently is a 文史资料 piece by 杨芳毓. Yang was a returned student who was a subordinate to the Sichuan warlord Liu Xiang in the 1930s...
If you go down in the flood it's gonna be your fault*
Watching the coverage of the New Orleans flood I was reminded of the 1998 Yangtze floods, and it occurred to me that this is yet another example of how China is...
Viewing Africa from Asia
(This is a comment on Tim Burke’s syllabus on Images of Africa cross-posted from his blog. I am putting it up here to see if anyone has any suggestions on image...
Eat and run
Chinese food culture There is a current series on Amsterdam on Slate where Seth Stevenson suggests that the Dutch are almost never seen walking and eating. Amer...
Nourish the people with cheap diesel
In the post below Jonathan asked how a Confucian China could really be in the future. One possible bit of data comes from this article (From Brad DeLong). NYT r...
Should grad students blog?
There was a rather nasty piece on academic blogging in the Chronicle. Comments at Bitch Ph.D. The basic thrust of it is that grad students should not have blogs...
Frog in a Well
I’ve noticed that while we call this blog Frog in a Well, we have never actually posted the story. This is from Burton Watson’s translation of Zhuan...