Art and status and women and mirrors and…
This is an image from the back of a Song dynasty mirror in the collection of Martin J. Powers. As he describes it One [woman], on the right, tends a child and s...
Author: Alan Baumler
Dress and identity in the Qing
I have been reading Guojun Wang’s Staging Personhood: Costuming in Early Qing Drama. I am not particularly a student of drama, or of costume, but in the T...
Masks in recent Chinese History
So this is a post that already seems outdated, but I thought I would do it anyway. Masks now mean something quite different than they did before, and I am sure ...
Mapping China from the air
Since I have been posting maps, I thought I would put this up. This is from Shigeru Kobayashi 小林茂, Gaihōzu : Teikoku Nihon no Ajia chizu 外邦図 : 帝国日本のアジア地図 (Tōk...
Spreading Revolution from Wuhan, 1911
This is an image I use in class, from Caroline Blunden and Mark Elvin. Cultural Atlas of China New York: Facts on File, 1983. p.158. This has some good images i...
Radio in China
I was looking around for some information on Chinese radio during the Republic and discovered that there is not much out there. There are some cites in this the...
Princess Iron Fan and the origins of Asian animation
Like most of you (I assume) I knew that Princess Iron Fan 鐵扇公主 (1941) was China’s first full-length animated film. Also like most of you I assume that you...
Confucius hates Japan
Once upon a time I was big into Chinese currency. Not so much as a speculator, but as one of the people who bought old banknotes from people who were selling th...
Iron Man Wang
For your teaching pleasure, here is the story of Iron Man Wang, from China Reconstructs, Sept, 1977. I have a pile of old 70’s Chinese propaganda magazine...
Opening vignettes on Tokugawa prostitutes
I never really responded to Jonathan’s post on opening vignettes as pedagogy, but I do like using them. In fact, I will be using a couple Monday. Sometime...
Classical Chinese for Everyone
Looking for a fun book? Look no further! Bryan Van Norden’s Classical Chinese for Everyone: A Guide for Absolute Beginners is it. This is a book for anyon...
Revolutionary China
Looking to spend some money? There are a lot of good essays in the Routledge Handbook of Revolutionary China. The editing is not that good, but there are some r...
Bullets and Opium-Tiananmen thirty years later
Part of my summer reading has been Liao Yiwu‘s Bullets and Opium: Real-Life Stories of China after the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Liao got in trouble afte...
The soldier-archeologist
Among other things, the Japanese empire was an empire of science. Conquest led to (or was proceeded by) masses of geographers, anthropologists, geologists etc. ...
Ichi-F -Japanese workingman’s blues
One of my Christmas gifts was Ichi-F: A Worker’s Graphic Memoir of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant As it says on the cover, it is a worker’s memoir. The...