Academics read the newspaper
And find good things (On time zones in China) And bad things (On Qing cultural history) Both of these articles are attempts by non-specialists to explain China,...
Category: China
Following Younghusband to Lhasa
Just a quick post of a wonderful website I stumbled upon doing a bit of background research for a point I needed to make in the chapter I’m currently work...
Bad Daoism
Calling Sam Crane. Apparently Laozi is the best way to understand modern American Conservatism. Original here. Favorable notice here. It is nice to know that L...
Fields and Periodization (yes, again)
Jeff Vanke, now blogging at The Historical Society’s THS Blog, was looking for some guidance on how to properly divide up the history of the world into fi...
Battle for the blogosphere
The anniversary for the June 4th movement in China is just about here, once again shining a light on China’s progress in the human rights area in the last...
I may never have to teach again
As the Chinese movie industry gears up for a biopic on Confucius I get closer and closer to my goal of never having to do any work. Soon I will be able to just...
Management by Hard Liquor
A description of the administrative methods of the Han Dynasty chancellor Cao Shen Day and night he drank strong liquor. Everyone from the aristocratic high off...
Zhou Confucianism? Ming Quality Control?
In an absolutely fascinating article on the modern petition redress system1 focusing on attempts by regional officials to prevent petitions from reaching a nati...
Heartland Mandala
I was surprised to learn, about ten days ago, that PSU was going to be hosting a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks creating a sand mandala. This is a touring comp...
Mysteries of History (transportation division)
Here is a bit of a puzzle for our readers to clear up. A while back I pointed at a nice collection of 17th Century Dutch pictures of Japan. Jonathan Dresner was...
Chinese Goldilocks
Recently, I’ve been looking at Maoist period elementary Chinese textbooks (or perhaps a better translation would be Language Arts textbooks), which are co...
When America looked East (or maybe West)
Speechwars.com lets you see how many times American presidents have used various words in their State of the Union addresses. This is not a perfect representati...
Need a dissertation topic?
There is a very interesting review of Simon Winchester’s Bomb, Book, and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China (sold in America as The Ma...
Ming Dynasty tax revolt
Historians write a lot about taxes, in part because we are often interested in states and what they do, and taxes are something that states do a lot of. Taxatio...
You are nimble in warfare!
Two Western Zhou bronze inscriptions, both dating from around 850 B.C. and describing the war against the Xianyun1 It was the ninth month, first auspiciousness,...