Guangxu poisoned!
Update on this breaking story here and here I’m not sure how important this will turn out to be. I always thought it was fairly obvious he had been bumped...
Category: China
Mountains, Vikings, and Chinese Poetry
Lots of people seem to like Chinese poetry. The latest NYRB has a review of a reprint of A.C. Graham’s Poems of the Late T’ang by Eliot Weinberger.1...
Appel de Blois
European historians are appealing for support in resisting laws that will criminalize historical inquiry. You can find the text of their appeal and a link to an...
What to do with temples?
Another in our occasional series on teaching aids. One aspect of Chinese modernization that most teachers mention is the modernizing state’s need for buil...
Invisible Books – Might Have Been Written But Never Were
The Italian writer Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is a dreamy fabulation on cities that Marco Polo might have visited – if only they had existed. Of cou...
A Blog Post Upon Roast Pig
I was reading a discussion of progressive economics at Progressive Historians and was stopped dead in my tracks by a quote from Henry George There is a delusion...
Living With Wikipedia (China Beat) and Social Bookmarking
China Beat asked me to pull together some thoughts on “WIKIPEDIA, the Free Encyclopedia.” With help from several friends, including Alan Baumler and Konrad Laws...
Chinese Rough Music
China Beat has a post up from Kate Merkel-Hess on the latest evolution of the “human flesh search engine”, which can be described as Chinese netizen...
21st Asian History Carnival Pt II Now Posted
Leanne Ogasawara has posted Pt II of the 21st Asian History Carnival at her Tang Dynasty Times. Although she complains that the blogosphere is in a depression a...
Pirates!
September 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Again. I was going to do a short bit on the current state of Chinese pirate scholarship1 but Robert Ant...
Pearl Buck's Intriguing Staying Power: Imperial Woman
Parade Magazine (September 14, 2008) asked Laura Bush what she’s been reading: “The Imperial Woman, by Pearl S. Buck. I picked up this book after re...
Collecting Songs
In Imperial China, emperors and other high officials sometimes disguised themselves as commoners and mingled with the ordinary folk to learn what they were real...
"Never the Twain Shall (Track) Meet": Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Olympic Lies
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of the Yale School of Management has a well informed insider’s view of the Olympics, “Olympics Reveal East-West Divide.” (F...
Down with the Xia!
People who have been following the Three Dynasties chronology debate have already seen this article by Li Liu and Hong Xu “Rethinking Erlitou: legend, his...
What can China learn from the Jews
Via 鲍昆 an interview with Lydia Liu1 Liu’s work has to to with the difficulties of cultural contact and translation in the 19th century, so it is nice to s...