Sinology and Simon Leys
New York Review of Books Classics has re-printed Simon Leys’ The Hall of Uselessness: Selected Essays. This makes him the first Sinologist to crack the NY...
Category: Books
China in Cartoons II
The second volume of Understanding China Through Comics is out.1 I ‘reviewed‘ the first volume and concluded that Jing Liu is no Larry Gonick, but i...
The Chinese are topsy-turvy
One common theme that turns up a lot in older Western writings on China is the idea that China is the opposite of the West. Just take our, normal, rational way ...
Commander Bradshaw goes to China
Lately I have been going through Project Guttenberg and reading old books set in China. Late at night when you are too tired to go to bed, or in the odd quarter...
The Birth of Chinese Feminism
Columbia University Press sent me a copy of a really good book, Lydia Liu, Rebecca Karl and Dorothy Ko. The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transn...
Why are the Chinese atheists?
Sam Crane, at Useless Tree, comments on the recent study that shows that China has a higher percentage of atheists than anyplace else in the world. Sam suggests...
History and hats
One book that I use in my classes is Bickers’ Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai. The book is the story of William Tinkler, an Englishman wh...
Teachers as sages. Also, Tibet
Here is something wonderful from Donald Lopez’s Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West1 If you have not read it, it is a very good book on...
A memory stirs..
Reading Emily Whewell’s review of this new book on the Chinese and Japanese treaty port systems and extraterritoriality brought back a long-ago scholarly ...
Japanese views of China
December 13 seems as good a day as any to talk about Japanese imperialism. One of the books I taught this semester was Ishikawa Tatsuzo Soldiers Alive.1 It̵...
Rustic poetry
The contrast between the center and the periphery is a common theme in Chinese literature. To be an official sent from the capital to the provinces, or a sent-d...
If we want to revere China, there is no greater reverence than to put the Chinese ways into practice
Thanks to Columbia University Press I just got a copy of David Kang, East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute1 This is a very fine book, ...
Reconsidering Marco Polo
“Marco Polo’s reports of China, now judged mostly hearsay….” Perry Anderson, LRB I got an email from a student who found my blog post in which...
Monumental Histories
Quite by coincidence, I ended up reading three books on Chinese monuments, but not until the third did I realize that what I was reading was a history of modern...